• A new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear program will likely be harsher than the previous one, after inspectors were denied access to an area suspected to be a main weapons site. [Haaretz]

• What an Israeli strike on Iran could look like. [Free Beacon]

• One of the senior columnists for Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper, Yisrael Hayom, has a contract with Netanyahu’s office to write speeches and lectures. [Haaretz]

• A harrowing look at the frontlines in Syria. [CBS News]

• Jason Diamond on life as a former barista. [NYT]

Happy bagel and lox day!

In December 2010, together with some 30 Israeli defense and political journalists, I boarded a bus that took us to a building on the top of a hill overlooking Glilot junction, five miles north of Tel Aviv. We had come to Mossad headquarters for a meeting with Dagan, who was then the head of the agency. It was supposed to be an off-the-record briefing. But this being Israel, within hours after the meeting ended, most of what Dagan told us was on the Web and in the papers.

What he said was shocking. The Mossad chief told us that Iran would obtain nuclear warheads by 2014 at the earliest, and thus, he argued, there was no need for an Israeli military strike for the time being. Dagan’s claim ran directly counter to the public line of Israel’s defense establishment: that Iran would obtain the bomb much sooner.

Since that meeting more than a year ago, Dagan has been on a crusade to stop Israel from launching an imminent military strike against Iran. He has reiterated the argument that he laid out to us in Mossad headquarters—against a strike and in favor of sanctions and covert operations—at various public events and private conversations over the past year. And though Dagan is no longer head of Mossad, his view carries tremendous weight: His perspective on a possible Israeli strike is shared by many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers and Israel’s security establishment.

Dagan’s campaign has enraged Barak and Netanyahu, who accuse him of undermining Israeli deterrence. Barak and Netanyahu support an Israeli military strike in the near future, and for the past few months, with increasing intensity, they have tried to create the impression that they are considering such an attack this year.

Which view will prevail? At stake is the future of Israel, the lives of Iranians and Israelis, the supply of oil to the United States and the West, and the stability of the whole Middle East.

***

The roots of the tension within the highest level of Israel’s political-military leadership go back nearly five years, when Barak, Dagan, and the rest of the Cabinet were faced with the delicate question of whether to bomb Syria’s nuclear reactor in the Dir al-Zur region. In summer 2007, the Cabinet, led by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, deliberated behind closed doors to discuss the assessments of Mossad and Israeli military intelligence of a big structure that Syria was secretly building near the Euphrates River. The undisputed conclusion was that Syria was constructing a reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs and that the plans for the reactor had been provided by North Korea.

The Cabinet’s overwhelming decision was to order the Israeli air force to launch a military strike before radioactive materials would be introduced and it would be too late. Barak was the most senior Cabinet member to oppose the idea, and he argued that Israel could wait a few more months. Olmert, then-Chief of Staff General Gabi Ashkenazi, Dagan, and other Cabinet ministers were astonished to hear it. They suspected that Barak had a hidden agenda motivated by his own ambition to be prime minister. That summer, Barak and the Cabinet knew that within three or four months the findings of an inquiry commission investigating the 2006 Lebanon war would be released. They expected the commission would blame Olmert for major failures of the war, and thus he would be forced to resign. Barak hoped to replace him.

Over the course of a few weeks, Barak realized that he was in unsplendid isolation. Ultimately, he decided to join his Cabinet colleagues in approving the attack. (The Cabinet voted 13 to 1 to approve the attack. Avi Dichter, then minister of homeland security, opposed it.) In September 2007, eight U.S.-made Israeli F-16 fighter planes destroyed Syria’s nuclear ambitions when they bombed the reactor.

Barak’s behavior during that process caused Dagan and other military leaders to lose their faith in him. As one senior official put it, “If he zigzagged then, what assures us that his motives this time are pure?” Indeed, three years ago in private conversation, Barak opposed a military strike by Israel against Iran. So, what made him change his mind? It’s not clear. One possibility is that he wants to please Netanyahu in the hopes that the prime minister will take him aboard Likud and reinstate him in the Defense Ministry after the next elections, which are set for November 2013 but most likely will be sooner.

Continue reading: ‘When the sword is on our neck’

Cedar’s latest film sparkles with intelligence and droll characterizations but is hardly the kind of movie you’d expect to break out beyond its homegrown base. Yet that is exactly what has happened, making a good argument for the more local the product, the more universal its appeal: Even before its Oscar nod, the film picked up the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, where it was acquired by Sony Classics. It will be interesting to see whether Footnote, which opens in early March in New York and Los Angeles, lives up to its early billing—whether viewers will respond with equal enthusiasm to its quirky human drama, in which Talmud scholarship and Hebrew philology feature as much as the personal lives of the characters. One of the singular pleasures of this film is the way it delves into the aches and pains of an esoteric intelligentsia, a group who don’t usually get much play in the popular media, without becoming self-conscious in the process. Cedar moves with ease from scenes featuring academic tempests in a teapot to those that give us a glimpse of the domestic backgrounds of his two main characters. Shlomo Bar Aba, who is a well-known comic in Israel, is superb as Eliezer Shkolnik, the dour academic outsider who finally—almost—gets his moment of glory, and the other roles, including Lior Ashkenazi as Eliezer’s son, a deft academic player, and Alisa Rosen, as Eliezer’s shut-out wife, are equally well-cast. The closing 15 minutes of the film, which are choreographed as much as directed, are priceless.

Last weekend, after Shabbat was over in Israel and in anticipation of the movie’s release, I spoke on the phone with the 43-year-old director at his home in Tel Aviv. Cedar, who immigrated to Israel from New York with his family at the age of 6 and later studied philosophy and theater history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and NYU Film School, is married and the father of three children, ages 10, 6, and 2.

Did the response to the film surprise you, especially given its very specific Jerusalem setting?

When it was accepted to Cannes, I was in shock. It was very hard to picture this film in a competition in Cannes. I think a lot of the people there had a similar response: that it was an odd choice. Cannes gives it the kind of exposure that’s so hard to get with a film. And then Sony buying it on the first day. It’s a narrow crack a film goes through, and Cannes is a gateway. More than a film that can only take place in Israel, it’s a Jerusalem film. Even if it had taken place someplace else geographically, it’s still a Jerusalem film. Two scholars fighting over the tiniest nuance of language: That’s what Jerusalem is—or what I want it to be.

Did you have any model for the kind of film you were trying to make?

It’s a film that can’t be compared to anything. While we were preparing the shoot, we decided that the way the father character sees the world—in extreme detail, the way a philologist looks at a text—was the way we were going to look at the story. Extremely subjectively and not considering the larger context. My previous films had left me with a lot of ideas that I didn’t know how to fit into the story; that’s the way narrative films are. Because of the style of this film, its flexibility, anything that was important to the story found its way onto the screen.

What led you to cast Shlomo Bar Aba as Eliezer Shkolnik?

There’s something about him that’s reminiscent of Peter Sellers—someone people don’t know what to expect from, although Israelis know him and expect to laugh when they see him. I had him in mind when I was writing the film, but I didn’t know him and didn’t know if he could deliver. When I met him I thought he was wrong, but during the rehearsal period and during the discussion of the character it turned out that there were so many things he identified with. He’s very connected to this kind of person.

How autobiographical is the film?

It’s more my nightmare than my life. The jealousy between a father and son—the inability to be proud of your child—is something I’m afraid of more than I actually feel.

Continue reading: Hollywood today

Kagan’s purpose in defending U.S. foreign-policy activism here is to deflect criticism of America’s unpopular engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is no easy task, and to perform it, Kagan adopts the two-stage approach to persuasion made famous by Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man: Establish first that there is trouble in River City, and then propose a solution, namely a marching band. Kagan also offers a marching band, but with 40 divisions behind it.

Where River City is concerned, Kagan’s argument is unexceptionable: Without American leadership, the feckless Europeans can’t be counted on to do anything, and the Chinese can’t be counted on not to do things badly. America shouldn’t abandon its position as the leading world power.

What America should do with that position is a different question. In his columns at the Weekly Standard and the Washington Post and in a series of books, Kagan has been the punditry’s most insistent advocate of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. After 6,400 U.S. dead and more than 30,000 wounded, and direct and indirect expenditures in excess of $3 trillion, nation-building is ballot-box poison. Kagan finds it easier to preach generalities. That makes the present volume read like a poor man’s cholent, with the meat of the matter lost in filler. His most important and controversial assertion is that Muslim democracy constitutes a new global wave of democratic advance, but he makes his case weakly and in passing.

“Americans have often been plagued by doubt [about nation-building],” Kagan allows. “They have resented the costs, both material and moral. Wars are expensive, and occupations even more so. A century ago it was José Santos Zelaya and Victoriano Huerta. In recent years it has been Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi.” That’s like saying, “Honey, I bought a lawn mower, a tennis racket, a Bentley, and a new set of patio furniture.” The highest estimate I have seen for the cost of America’s 1998 action against Serbia’s Milosevic, refugee resettlement and all, is about $25 billion, perhaps a hundredth of the combined costs of Iraq and Afghanistan—not to mention the near absence of casualties.

There was little opposition to bombing Serbia and sending peacekeepers afterward. But there has been impassioned objection from both left and right to a massive, multiyear commitment on the premise that America could engineer Muslim democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even worse, the Iraqi adventure exacerbated the Iranian nuclear threat. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, explained in 2009, America couldn’t strike at Iran’s bomb-building capacity: “We have lots of Americans who live in that region who are under the threat envelope right now [because of the] capability that Iran has across the Gulf.”

In 2004, Kagan lauded in the New York Times the “small but growing movement among scholars of Islam, a group diverse enough to include Gilles Kepel of France and [fellow Weekly Standard contributor] Reuel Marc Gerecht of the United States, that believes the real promise of democracy lies with devout Muslims.” And he continues to believe that the world revolves around the prospects for Muslim democracy. After the second great wave of democracy that followed World War II, and a third wave from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Kagan writes:

it is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of the Third Wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history.

He has no illusions that Muslim democracy, should it materialize, will be friendly to America:

Americans, having helped topple dictators in the Middle East, are not sure how they feel about what may follow. The inevitable victory of Islamist parties in some Arab states will probably bring governments to power that are less accommodating to some American interests than the previous dictatorships had been.

But Kagan thinks this is a good thing rather than a bad thing: “Americans’ enduring interest in a liberal world order generally transcends other, more narrow and temporary interests. The United States can lose an Egyptian ally but still gain a healthier world order.” Indeed, he lauds the Obama Administration for helping to topple erstwhile Arab allies: “America found itself withdrawing support from longtime allies like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. … American power became a decisive factor shaping the regional and international environment in which the Arab political turmoil unfolded.”

One doubts if any outcome in the Arab world would change Kagan’s mind. In fact, an Islamist government may be the least of Egypt’s problems. With its economy in free fall and its foreign exchange reserves running out, Egypt may soon find itself with no government at all, like Somalia. The Deputy Supreme Guide (that is his actual title) of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood warned recently that economic collapse would “transform a peaceful revolution into a hunger revolution” and asked for American help. Nonetheless, Egypt also is prosecuting American democracy activists, risking the American aid it now receives.

Continue reading: Democratic processes

In November, Pejman Yousefzadeh, an Iranian-American Jew, articulated a similar sense of widespread concern in Tablet Magazine:

And, finally, there is Iran’s conflict with Israel. It’s an issue that torments Iranian Jews, who care deeply about what happens to Iran but are not willing to see the Islamic regime harm Israel’s security interests or the lives of innocent Israelis—many of whom are émigrés from Iran. Were it a conflict with any other country antagonistic toward Israel, Iranian Jews would have significantly less hesitation—if any—in endorsing a military response to any threat to Israel. But in this case, the country antagonistic toward Israel is Iran, to which Iranian Jews naturally and obviously continue to feel a deep tie. As such, Iranian Jews are faced with a revolting choice: endorse military strikes against Iran that may—or may not—set back the nuclear program but may also kill scores of Iranians, or do nothing and gamble that Israel will not be consumed by a nuclear conflagration.

Jews With Ties To Iran And Israel Feel Conflicted [NPR]
Related: Personal Revolution [Tablet Magazine]

Conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute’s Guttman Center for Surveys and the Avi Chai Foundation, the survey, which analyzed the responses of 2,800 Israelis, confirmed the truths I held to be self-evident when I grew up in Israel not too long ago. (Avi Chai is affiliated with the Keren Keshet Foundation, which created Nextbook Inc., Tablet Magazine’s publisher.) Back then—after the arrival of McDonald’s but before the second Intifada—it felt like a given that if you were Jewish you most likely had some sort of relationship with God, regardless of your level of observance. Except for a few pesky atheists, my friends and I all defined ourselves as secular even as we fasted on Yom Kippur, took much pleasure in the way the streets cleared up on Friday afternoons, and directed our prayers—about girls we wished would notice us or older brothers we wished would make it home safely from the front—to God.

Not much has changed, according to this new survey. Yet when the findings were released, many of my colleagues on the Israeli left took to the op-ed pages to register their shock and lament the demise of modern Israel. The survey, went the common cri de coeur, was a sure sign of the impending apocalypse, which would finally turn the Jewish state into an intolerant theocracy.

Writing in Haaretz, journalist Uri Misgav argued that the findings reflected a “depressing ideological situation.” The disturbing thing “about those who believe in the theory of the Chosen People,” he wrote, “is the fear that they are not particularly smart,” perceiving the world on “an infantile theological level” that surely should have been vanquished by reason and modernity.

In the same paper, columnist Gideon Levy sounded even grimmer. “You have to give it to the pollsters,” he wrote. “They let the cat out of the bag. … Israeli society isn’t secular, it isn’t liberal, and it isn’t enlightened.”

It’s easy for me to understand Misgav and Levy. Like them, I consider myself a proud member of the battered and decimated tribe known as the Israeli left. Like them, I look with horror as brutes of all stripes—from hill-dwelling Jewish terrorists to Avigdor Lieberman and his comrades in Knesset—trample democracy’s core values. But in their disdain for and fear of religion, Misgav, Levy, and the lion’s share of the Israeli left fail to understand not only their past but also, more troubling, their future. Unless the Israeli left learns how to stop fearing and start loving—or at least understanding—religion, its chances of advancing a popular agenda are slim.

***

It’s tempting for secular, educated adults to see religion as the flickering remnant of a primitive fire that once guided mankind—a fire no longer necessary now that we have the quiet heat of science, technology, and rational thought. And it’s easy to look at an idea like divine election as nothing more than pure chauvinism. I used to entertain these notions. But two years ago, together with my friend and teacher Todd Gitlin, I decided to grapple with these ideas by writing a book.

What I learned startled me. Far from a simple call to exceptionalism, chosenness is a devilishly complex idea. At the height of the biblical drama, at the moment a collection of disparate tribes are made into a solid nation, God appears to the Israelites at Mount Sinai and bequeaths to them their status as his chosen sons and daughters. “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests,” God says, “and a holy nation.” Why the Israelites? What does it mean to be chosen? Are the children of the chosen also chosen in perpetuity? God never tells.

The result is a never-ending quest, over the course of millennia, to solve this divine riddle. To have been chosen means spending a lifetime wondering about what it means to have been chosen. Some possible answers to this question align neatly with the Israeli left’s worst fears: Much of the settler movement is powered by an understanding of chosenness as a divine mandate to occupy land, even when others are living on it.

Continue reading: Chosenness as a challenge

• Circumcisions helps prevent the spread of HIV and are now, thanks to an Israeli company, as easily done and minimally painful as ever. [NYT]

• Contributing editor Jeff Goldberg adds a bit more room to the new one he tore for John J. Mearsheimer a few years ago. [Atlantic Goldblog]

• An OECD study pegs Israel the second most-educated country in the world (congratulations Canada, I guess). [Haaretz]

• Submit your embarrassing bat mitzvah photos to Gawker. Bar mitzvah photos are presumably banned to give the ladies a chance to win. [Gawker]

• The lost and new Jews of … Crown Heights! [NYT]

If you read Hebrew, you’ll recognize that this is Haaretz discussing Liel Leibovitz’s Scroll post yesterday.

To hear Israel’s comedy geniuses tell it, young American Jews come in three flavors. There’s the fat stoner whose vocabulary consists solely of the word “awesome!” There’s the fat and ugly girl, played by a man and sounding like a deflated dog’s chew toy. And there’s the hot JAP who brags about the fact that her home in the Hamptons is bigger than the entirety of the Jewish state.

At first, I attributed the whole thing to laziness: Stereotypes, after all, are the bluntest weapon in the joke writer’s arsenal. But then I got to thinking. There’s a reason Israelis still find JAP jokes to be the height of comedy, and it has nothing to do with Americans and everything to do with Israelis.

Once upon a time, Israelis saw themselves as khaki-clad toughs, the sort of people who could hop on a plane and fly to Entebbe and free hostages and kick ass. This time was called the 1970s. Since then, the same thing happened to Israel that happens to anyone who grows older and wealthier: It settled down, it got fat, it became better-known for its high-tech entrepreneurs than for its commandos. When it tried to assassinate Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal by injecting poison into his ear, it failed miserably and was shamed into handing Meshaal the antidote. It carried out an operation in Dubai that was more Fletch than James Bond.

So, rather than age gracefully, Israel went looking for someone to pick on. And American Jews are an easy target. They’re gullible—can you believe all the money those suckers are giving us?!? They’re soft, what with spending four years in college instead of three years at some silly desk job, which is what the majority of Israel Defense Forces soldiers end up doing. They’re Diaspora. Let’s make fun of them.

This dynamic, I think, explains the recent spate of insults emanating from Israel, which in addition to this sketch include those preposterous ads encouraging Israelis living in the United States to return home at once. Psychologists call it cognitive dissonance: When someone—a person or a state—holds strong beliefs and perceptions and then those beliefs and perceptions are suddenly and strongly negated by reality, one solution is to introduce a new idea that resolves the tension. In this case, the calming idea is this distortion of American Jews: It doesn’t matter, Israelis tell themselves, that we’re no longer as invincible as we would like to believe we are, because these soft suckers, our cousins from America, are downright laughable.

Meanwhile, it would be big of American Jews who care about Israel, in the face of this ridiculous ridicule, to find a way to help the Jewish state resolve its self-destructive neuroses.

Israeli Parody of Taglit-Birthright Propaganda Trips [Eretz Nehederet]
Related: Mixed Marriage [Tablet Magazine]
Murder in Dubai [Tablet Magazine]

Only six months before, Koch’s displeasure with the president had become a national news story. On July 25, 2011, the former mayor offered his official endorsement of Republican Bob Turner for Anthony Weiner’s vacated seat in the House of Representatives following the latter’s unceremonious resignation. Despite the fact that Democrats outnumber Republicans there nearly 3 to 1 and have held the office for more than a century, Turner won the 9th District of New York in a landslide. “I didn’t know Bob Turner,” Koch would later confess. “It pissed me off that [Obama] made a demand on Israel that it go back to the peace table and accept the pre-’67 borders.” How else could a self-professed liberal have offered his support of a Tea Party member whose campaign platform included such progressive policies as cutting federal spending by 35 percent, opposing same-sex marriage, and advocating intelligent design? Koch explained: “I perceived [Obama’s] stance on Israel to be hostile. I decided we would send a message.”

The message was received. On Sept. 21, 2011, hours after delivering a speech to the United Nations general assembly in which he denounced the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood and temporarily restored the faith of Israeli loyalists across the country, Obama brokered a détente of his own with one of the Jewish state’s staunchest defenders. Their conversation, held at the New York Public Library, was frank. “He said that my voice was heard outside of New York and that he needed me,” noted the former mayor from his Manhattan office. During their talk, Obama expressed his distress that the Jewish community had grown unhappy with him. “He was surprised because he thought he was doing what they wanted,” said Koch. “I said ‘No, you’re not.’ ” Less than a week after their kibitz, Koch committed to campaign on the president’s behalf in 2012. For a man whose trademark question “How’m I doin’?” has long since fossilized, it appears that flattery—steady and effusive—heals all wounds.

It’s easy to dismiss Obama’s overtures as lip service to one of the nation’s most recognizably Jewish politicians—the political equivalent of visiting your doddering grandfather in Boca. Still, Koch’s influence is irrefutable. Just last week, Beit Morasha, the Jerusalem-based educational center, honored him for his “public service, leadership and commitment to the State of Israel and the Jewish People” during a separate dinner event at Guastavino’s, a banquet hall under the 59th Street bridge that—essentially like Koch himself—has been declared a New York City landmark. The former mayor has proven he will defend Israel against any threat, real or imagined, even if it means cutting off the schnoz of the Democratic Party to spite its face. In the deep winter of his political career, it may be the only issue on which his famously nasal voice still resonates.

***

On an unseasonably warm afternoon this fall, I met Koch at his law firm, Bryan Cave, in midtown Manhattan. (My father is a partner there.) The walls of the former mayor’s corner office were lined with photographs and plaques, their frames practically touching. Above his computer hung a signed picture of President George W. Bush as well as a letter by William F. Buckley typed on stationery from the National Review: “Just an idle note to tell you that I’ve had hours of pleasure and edification reading your lyrical bulletins. You make me feel absolutely useless if I contrast my own nugatory work with your spicy and learned columns. I’ve been ill, but I will recover and descend on you, and we’ll have a good, nostalgic meal.” Below that, in a considerably smaller frame, sat a photo of Barack Obama. An oversized, silver menorah stood on the radiator along the near window.

If Koch’s office doubled as a museum of contemporary political history, then its featured exhibit was Ed Koch, meticulously preserved in all of his ’80s splendor. The former mayor sat motionless behind his desk, a big, chestnut-colored number adorned with family photos, a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer, and a copy of The Little Red Book of New York Wisdom by Former Mayor Ed Koch. He wore a dark gray suit with a two-toned shirt and a set of black suspenders. From the neck down, it almost looked as though he had never left office. From the neck up was a different story. More than 20 years past the normal age of retirement, Koch continues to work five days a week, and all the extra hours on the clock have begun to take their toll. His face looked gaunt, his eyes puffy. Tiny constellations of liver spots now dot his forehead and cheeks. While he insists there have been no residual effects from his assorted heart failures, his speech has grown slower and more deliberate. “I have a balance problem,” he said. “I’ve never fallen, thank God. Breaking a hip is a major fear. But I rarely miss a day of work.”

Of the nearly two dozen titles in the “Ed Koch library,” a term he uses (fondly) for the collection of books that have been written by and about Ed Koch, only 1999’s I’m Not Done Yet! co-authored with Daniel Paisner, attempts to chart his post-mayoral career. The book’s subtitle, Keeping at It, Remaining Relevant, and Having the Time of My Life, serves as a kind of mission statement for Koch. Since leaving office in 1989, he has served as, among other professions, an adjunct professor at New York University, a television judge on The People’s Court, a children’s book author, a political commentator, and a radio host. Then, of course, there’s his ample body of film criticism—much of it archived at the appropriately titled website The Mayor at the Movies. Many of these reviews seem to dance on the edge of self-parody. Take, for example, his thoughts on Terrence Malick’s Oscar-nominated Tree of Life:

What’s the movie about? Got me … The story of the cosmos is better told at the Rose Planetarium in the Museum of Natural History. It didn’t do well with me, although I have to be truthful about it. The audience at the end of the show applauded. I thought to myself, am I the little Japanese boy who said ‘but the king is naked?’ The emperor of Japan. Naked! I thought it was a put-on or a put-down of the audience, but maybe I’m alone. Go see it. You might like it. I didn’t, and I’m giving it a minus.

You can remove Ed Koch from office, but you can’t remove the office from Ed Koch. “People like me because I’m a lot tougher than the major critics,” he said. “I don’t pretend to be an expert.”

Continue reading: Building, and naming, bridges

It’s important to understand that the enticing prospect of anointing an outsider surely played some roll in Sheldon and Miriam Adelson’s decision to very publicly donate $10 million to a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC this month, thereby almost single-handedly materially and politically keeping Gingrich in the race for the Republican nomination. Frontrunner Mitt Romney’s campaign and his Super PACs have outspent Gingrich’s in Florida, whose primary is tomorrow, four to one. So it’s just like your bracket. If you give money to Romney, you’ve probably picked the winner, but you’re just another drop in the bucket—he doesn’t owe you particularly much. Give to Gingrich, you’ve probably picked the loser; but if he wins, he owes you. In this case: what?

“People who know him,” the New York Times reported yesterday of Adelson, the multibillionare casino magnate, “say his affinity for Mr. Gingrich stems from a devotion to Israel as well as loyalty to a friend. A fervent Zionist who opposes any territorial compromise to make way for a Palestinian state, Mr. Adelson has long been enamored of Mr. Gingrich’s full-throated defense of Israel.” (The definitive take on Adelson remains Connie Bruck’s 2008 profile. Incidentally, the definitive take on Gingrich is probably her 1996 profile.) It is true that as early as 1995 Gingrich was pushing for things like the law (now waived by three successive presidents) that would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But it’s not like Romney is a dove on Israel (“Governor Romney is exactly right,” Gingrich said at Thursday night’s debate after the frontrunner spoke about Israel). And Wayne Barrett has argued, persuasively, that Gingrich was actually well to Adelson’s left on Israel at various points over the last decade—among other things, he went from acknowledging that Palestinian nationhood does indeed exist to, notoriously, denying its existence last month, a line quickly echoed by Adelson himself. (Never mind that AIPAC and, at least, publicly, the Netanyahu government are to Adelson’s left in their willingness to entertain the notion of negotiating with Palestinian leadership.) It seems that Gingrich has campaigned, and promised to govern, in ways designed to land him Adelson’s money. In the post-Citizens United world of unchecked giving to ostensibly unaffiliated but strikingly on-message Super PACs, this is incredibly important.

Frequently, this blog takes stories that are seemingly not Jewish, grabs the tiny strand that is Jewish, pulls real hard, and tries to argue that the whole story is, in fact, in some suggestive or implicit or even metaphorical way, Jewish. The Adelson-Gingrich story is the opposite: it seems very Jewish (or at least Israel-related), but it really isn’t. Gingrich is almost certainly not going to be the nominee; Romney is likely to crush Gingrich by double digits tomorrow in Florida, the first state in the Republican primaries with a voting population remotely resembling the country’s (and the first, it should be said, with lots of Jews), and go on to win the nomination. The chief danger heralded by the Adelson-Gingrich relationship aren’t the particulars of Adelson’s politics. It is the prospect of an individual being willing, able, and legally permitted to fund an entire campaign and essentially to purchase an elected office. Adelson isn’t breaking any laws; you can even argue that in disclosing these donations—the disclosures are part of the point, they served a political purpose for Gingrich, but still—he is being more honest than many of Romney’s big donors. I’ll even grant that this sort of power can be used for good: Adelson apparently exerted his influence to ensure that observant Jews can vote in the Nevada caucuses Saturday. Doesn’t matter. The system stinks.

Adelson failed, this time. Will he next time? Will someone else? It isn’t a question of being good or bad for the Jews. It’s bad for practically everybody.

The Man Behind Gingrich’s Money [NYT]
Is Gingrich’s Hard Line on Palestine Paid For By Sheldon Adelson? [The Daily Beast]
Related: The Brass Ring [The New Yorker]
Earlier: Backed By ‘Shelly,’ Newt Takes S.C.

But not in Israel.

Most of those who blogged or tweeted about the piece were residents of Arab countries. And most of these Arab readers neglected to mention that the celebratory piece was written by an Israeli journalist and published in an Israeli political blog. Israelis, on their end, largely ignored the piece, as they do nearly everything +972 does. According to Noam Sheizaf, +972’s editor in chief, only about 20 percent of the magazine’s readers are Israeli, a testament to the growing unpopularity of its progressive politics in a nation governed by a coalition, led by the Likud, of those who place land and faith above all else.

Rejected by the Arabs, ignored by the Jews: This is the reality with which the magazine’s 15 or so writers have to contend, writing, as they do, in English for a largely American audience. The magazine’s name is no coincidence: It is a tribute to Israel’s international calling code and an acknowledgement that, increasingly, any serious conversation about Israel’s policies is to be had outside of Israel’s borders.

Sparking that conversation is +972’s purpose. The magazine was founded last August,
almost by accident, when Goldman, Sheizaf, Ami Kaufman, and Dimi Reider met in Tel Aviv and agreed to collaborate. At the time, all were working journalists—Goldman and Reider were writing on a freelance basis for a host of international publications, Kaufman was an editor at several Israeli newspapers, Sheizaf was a political columnist for the local edition of Time Out, and all had blogs in English that aimed to provide Israeli news and commentary for an international audience. What began by posting each others’ stories on Facebook quickly evolved into a joint platform. From the first, the +972 crew agreed on an unorthodox journalistic ethos: All the magazine’s bloggers have complete freedom to write whenever and whatever they want. The magazine has a top editor, but the bloggers can fire him or her if they please. And whoever comes on board does so gratis. Other writers were quick to join. The website traffic monitor Alexa shows that visits to the magazine have grown exponentially since its inception, more than doubling in the past few months alone.

The magazine’s loose, horizontal structure, however, is not altogether porous: Underlining everything +972 does is a dedication to promoting a progressive worldview of Israeli politics, advocating an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and protecting human and civil rights in Israel and Palestine. And while the magazine’s reported pieces—roughly half of its content—adhere to sound journalistic practices of news gathering and unbiased reporting, its op-eds and critical essays support specific causes and are aimed at social and political change.

“I think there’s still a chance to resolve things,” said Sheizaf, 37, referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “but it’s not going to happen without dramatic pressure from abroad. Left on their own, Israelis will continue the occupation and the current political trends forever.” That’s why Sheizaf caters the magazine to English-speaking readers around the world. “It’s good to internationalize the conversation,” he added. “I believe in this thing we do. I think to bring honest, grassroots voices in English out of Israel, is of the essence.”

Just what these voices might say is unpredictable. Some, like Yossi Gurvitz—a veteran Israeli journalist and former Orthodox Jew—support the one-state solution that would turn Israel and the West Bank into one nation, with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of their ethnicity. Others, like the American-born Larry Derfner, a former writer for the Jerusalem Post, define themselves as liberal Zionists and support a two-state solution.

“I feel we have a very wide range of opinions [within the left],” said Sheizaf. “If we were more hot-headed, we’d fight each other. But compared to Israeli society and its nationalism and consensus and racism, we’re very focused. This hobby of the left, of having a fierce debate between people standing an inch away in the same ghetto, these arguments are interesting, but not enough to break the package.” And so, while +972’s bloggers often find themselves on opposite ends of their political camp’s most urgent questions, they realize that, for the most part, these differences are nearly invisible to the average American readers.

Plus, Sheizaf added, theirs isn’t an experiment just in politics, but in journalism as well: With traditional media pressed for funds and readers, the magazine’s renown—including frequent mentions in the New York Times—stems in part from its innovative journalistic practices.

Continue reading: Tear gas and Tel Aviv

• Israel will tell U.S. officials later this week that, according to its intelligence, Iran has not yet decided to build a nuclear bomb but it greatly fears for its regime’s stability; a genuine opposition could win March’s parliamentary elections. [Haaretz]

• President Ahmadinejad has ordered extra security for scientists, five of whom have been assassinated in recent years. [NYT]

• Oil, oil, oil, and nary a drop to sell (if you’re Iran). [WP]

• After initially promising to extend the Tal Law, which allows yeshiva students to more easily avoid army service, by five years, some members of the Cabinet objected and now Prime Minister Netanyahu is postponing discussion. [Ynet]

• A hearing into Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s alleged financial misdeeds that could result in his indictment began yesterday. [NYT]

To look back on The Israel Lobby’s reception today is to see a remarkable unanimity of rejection, from the New York Times (“mostly wrong … dangerously misleading”) and Foreign Affairs (“written in haste, the book will be repented at leisure”) to The Nation (“serious methodological deficiencies … a mess”). There was also a general recognition that in their insinuations about secret Jewish power, Mearsheimer and Walt—professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, respectively—had given a respectable imprimatur to old and sinister anti-Semitic tropes. Michael Gerson, an evangelical Christian adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post: “Every generation has seen accusations that Jews have dual loyalties, promote war, and secretly control political structures. These academics might not follow their claims all the way to anti-Semitism. But this is how it begins. This is how it always begins.”

Alert to the same danger, George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of State—who should know about how foreign policy is made—went so far as to write the foreword to The Deadliest Lies, a book by Abraham Foxman refuting the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis. “Jewish groups are influential,” Shultz wrote. “But the notion that these groups have anything like a uniform agenda, and that U.S. policy on Israel and the Middle East is the result of their influence, is simply wrong.”

Case closed, it would seem. And looking at the history of the last four years, there is no doubt that Walt and Mearsheimer failed in their stated goal of disrupting America’s close alliance with Israel—or what they call “treating Israel as a normal state.” Their book, published in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, opened with a complaint about how “serious candidates for the highest office in the land will go to considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one foreign country—Israel—as well as their determination to maintain unyielding U.S. support for the Jewish state.”

Fast forward to 2012, and the candidates for the Republican nomination were saying just this: At the Republican Jewish Coalition candidates’ forum last December, Mitt Romney promised that his first foreign trip as president would be to Israel. And for all the Jewish right’s criticism of President Obama’s Israel policy, the fact remains that in 2011 the United States pledged to veto the Palestinian bid for statehood in the United Nations.

But if The Israel Lobby has not changed American politics, it has had an insidious effect on the way people talk and think about Israel, and about the whole question of Jewish power. The first time I had this suspicion was when reading, of all things, a biography of H.G. Wells. In H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, published in the U.K. in 2010, Michael Sherborne describes how Wells’ contempt for Nazism went along with a dislike for Judaism and Zionism, which he voiced in deliberately offensive terms even as Nazi persecution of Jews reached its peak. “To take on simultaneously the Nazis … and the Jewish lobby may have been foolhardy,” Sherborne writes apropos of Wells in 1938.

There’s no way to prove that Sherborne’s “Jewish lobby” is the intellectual descendant of Walt and Mearsheimer’s “Israel lobby,” but the inference seems like a strong one. Wells, the term suggests, was not attacking Jews, a group that in the Europe of the 1930s was conspicuous for its absolute powerlessness in the face of the evolving Nazi genocide. Instead, he was bravely standing up to a powerful “lobby,” an organization designed to punish critics of the Jews, and whose influence was on a par somehow with that of the Nazis.

What is disturbing in the Sherborne example is the way Walt and Mearsheimer’s conception of Jewish power is projected into a historical moment when it could not have been less accurate. In France during the Dreyfus Affair, it was common for anti-Semites and anti-Dreyfusards to speak of a Jewish syndicate that secretly ruled the country. Now, in the 21st century, it has once again become possible to speak of a Jewish “lobby” that it would be foolish to cross. One of the central premises of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is that it takes unusual courage to oppose the Jews, since they use their power to ruthlessly suppress dissent in both the political world and the media. Walt and Mearsheimer place themselves on the side of the angels when they attack the Israel lobby’s “objectionable tactics, such as attempting to silence or smear anyone who challenges the lobby’s role or criticizes Israel’s actions.”

Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, fill their book with denials that they are talking about a secret syndicate: “The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy,” they write in the introduction. But the book itself, with its lists of Jewish organizations and journalists, and its tone of moral outrage, works to give exactly this impression. In fact, you don’t even have to read the book to get the impression: Looking at the cover is enough. In 2002, when the British magazine the New Statesman ran a cover story titled “The Kosher Conspiracy” with an image of a gold Star of David pressing down on a Union Jack, it was roundly criticized for copying imagery that would have been familiar in the Nazi periodical Der Sturmer. Yet The Israel Lobby, published by America’s most prestigious house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, bore a cover image of the American flag rendered in the blue and white of the Israeli flag—an unmistakable visual shorthand for Jewish domination. All by itself, this image nullified Walt and Mearsheimer’s repeated insistence that they were not describing the Israel lobby as a cabal.

So the floodgates were opened: What we have witnessed in the five years since is a blithe recuperation of dangerous, vicious imagery and ideas, with no apparent compunction about their origins or consequences. In 2010, Tablet’s Lee Smith investigated the way certain bloggers—including Walt himself—amassed large anti-Semitic readerships through their conspiratorial denunciations of Israel and the Israel Lobby. Quoting the comments sections of such blogs, Smith found them rife with unbridled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, such as “It seems to me that it is no exaggeration to say roundly that the USA in its entirety is under Jewish control of one variety or another.”

Compare this with Thomas Friedman’s Dec. 14, 2011 column in the New York Times, where he wrote about Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Criticized for this remark, he replied to New York’s Jewish Week that “In retrospect I probably should have used a more precise term like ‘engineered’ by the Israel lobby—a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don’t subscribe to.” But of course, “engineered” suggests exactly the same thing as “bought and paid for.” Decades ago, the right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan was widely denounced for referring to “Israel’s amen corner.” Today, an establishment pundit like Friedman can suggest even more crudely that Congress is bought and paid for by a foreign government with the sense that he is simply voicing conventional wisdom.

Continue reading: An intellectual landmark

Cahan, 48, grew up speaking Yiddish in Antwerp, Belgium, and is determined to save the language from extinction in the Jewish state, where he has lived for the past 30 years. He’s the first to concede he is not the best administrator: He owes roughly $40,000 to city hall for overdue property taxes, he smokes Camel cigarettes inside his library of 40,000 old books, and his meager budget provides the collection with no protection from Tel Aviv’s oppressive summer humidity.

But Cahan, who speaks Hebrew and English as well, also bears a quixotic passion for fully living in the half-dead language he loves. In summer he teaches Yiddish and performs musicals in his native tongue in Lithuania and Poland. He is also the lead singer in the band Mendy Cahan & Der Yiddish Express. On their 2005 album Yiddish Fever he sings translations of “Summertime” and “Fever,” along with other Yiddish classics and his own compositions. He whispers, sighs, and languorously wanders through the words, evoking the full range of emotion in a language often confined to old folk songs.

“After having paved the way through hundreds of years to build Jewish identity, finally we build our homeland,” he told me in English. “I find it unacceptable and wrong if Yiddish would not find its respectful, loving space.”

***

The first time I met Cahan, he was declaiming a poem by I.L. Peretz for a Russian television segment, which happened to be filming at the height of the summer’s protests in Tel Aviv. “Man!” he shouted in Yiddish, while piano accompanist Amnon Fischer read out the Hebrew translation. “Do not think life is a saloon, where everyone can push his way forward with his shoulders and eat and drink while others are watching from afar with glassy eyes and empty stomachs.”

Cahan’s receding mane of gray hair matched his bushy gray eyebrows and piercing blue eyes as he paced the stage. Behind him was a wall of books, the duplicates of works in Yiddish that he did not have the heart to throw away. At the other end of the library was a plastic pool with “a few fishelach,” as he called the fish he had brought to lighten the dusty mood. Three chairs stood together near the stage, their backs each sewn in the images of the greats of Yiddish literature: the gray-bearded Mendele Mocher Sforim, the redhead Sholom Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz, with a black tuft of hair to match his thick moustache. “We are friends, the books and I,” Cahan said. “I think they are in a better place than in a paper mill.”

A walking monument to gathering scattered pieces of a whole, Cahan wore a brown vest whose pockets bulged with two passports, four notebooks, a wallet, a yellow box of cigarettes, a city tax bill, vitamins, reading glasses, a USB drive, a mobile flip phone, tissues, a crumpled 20-shekel note, a lighter, and keys. Cahan said that when he immigrated to Israel from Belgium in 1980, he was surprised to see how sidelined his native tongue had become there.

“Many people spoke Yiddish,” Cahan said of the Israel he encountered. “They would read and meet in clubs, but it seemed as if it wasn’t a part of the whole Israeli experience.” In 1990, he started collecting books. At first, Cahan housed his collection in a dilapidated building in an industrial zone in Jerusalem. He then opened a second library in Tel Aviv. He named the organization overseeing the two libraries “Yung YiDish” in an effort to expand the Yiddish circle beyond the elderly. Yung YiDish is one of several Tel Aviv institutions—some 80 years old, and some open less than a decade—that are doing what they can to revive and preserve the tongue that once united the Jews of Eastern Europe, by teaching the language, offering theater, and printing books.

Cahan said it costs $150,000 to $200,000 to properly run Yung YiDish, but private donors provide only half of that. For the rest, he lives by the seat of his pants, begging city hall for a break on his taxes and meeting with the Ministry of Culture to ask for government funding. Cahan spreads word of his center while teaching in Eastern Europe and performing in cities around the world with significant Jewish populations. He dreams of holding Yiddish-cuisine cooking lessons. And he hopes to eventually sponsor translations of Yiddish classics into English, French, and Chinese and continue to promote Yiddish music and film. “Yiddish is more than just the shtetl,” he said.

***

Yiddish, an amalgam of German, Hebrew, and Aramaic written in Hebrew characters, was once the main Jewish dialect in Eastern Europe. But in Israel it was seen as the prime competition to the revival of Hebrew, according to Avraham Novershtern, the director of the Beth Shalom Aleichem Yiddish cultural center in Tel Aviv. “There was a conscious decision which began in early 20th century that Hebrew would be the language of the new state, and in that decision, there was violence against Yiddish,” said Novershtern. He described incidents of kiosks being burnt for selling Yiddish papers. In the 1930s and ’40s, Yiddish movies were sometimes kept from screens. Fights broke out on the streets over the public use of Yiddish.

Continue reading: Israel’s cosmopolitan heart

Rational, of course, is not the same thing as reasonable. A regime that shoots its own people in the streets, as the Iranian government did in June 2009, is not reasonable. In the policy debate, rationality refers to a regime’s interest in preserving itself. A regime is rational, therefore, if it understands that using a nuclear weapon would elicit a response that might spell its doom. An irrational regime is one that can’t be deterred because it may use a nuclear weapon regardless of the consequences.

Thus, the Islamic Republic’s threat last week to close the Strait of Hormuz—a move that would send oil prices skyrocketing—struck many as strong evidence of the regime’s irrationality. Interrupting the world’s oil supply would compel the United States, the guarantor of Persian Gulf security, to take military actions that might mean toppling Iran’s ruling establishment. On Sunday, U.S. Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said in no uncertain terms that if Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz, the United States “can defeat that.”

Others look at Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz as having little bearing on the country’s rationality. Since the Iranians know the Americans would have no trouble breaking through a blockade, their argument goes, Iran doesn’t actually have any intention of trying to close down one of the world’s most strategically vital waterways. This regime understands, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Sunday, that closing down the Strait of Hormuz is an American red line. If Iran crosses it, it jeopardizes its own existence—and so it won’t.

Those that argue the regime is irrational point to the fact that the Iranian regime regularly threatens to destroy Israel, which would retaliate by obliterating Iran. Those that claim Iran is rational write off such threats as mere rhetoric. A nuclear Iran, they say, poses little threat to a much more powerful Israel, never mind the United States. Membership in the club of countries with nuclear weapons might even make Tehran more responsible.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter whether the regime is rational or not. The issue is not whether the Iranians would use the bomb, but how Tehran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon would enhance the regime’s already reckless behavior. Moreover, it would severely limit the ability of the United States to respond to the provocations of this dangerous regime. For instance, if a nuclear-armed Iran actually closed the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. officials would be much less confident in their ability to re-open shipping lanes. American policy-makers already worried about high oil prices are not likely to risk the chances of a nuclear incident and even higher oil prices.

It’s pretty easy to make a strong case that the Iranian regime really is suicidal. This is the same ruling clique, after all, that pioneered the use of the suicide car-bombing during the course of the Lebanese civil wars from 1975 to 1990. The Iranians tapped their local allies, namely Hezbollah, for martyrdom operations against Israel, the United States, and other Western powers. The Iranians spent their own blood even more recklessly in the war with Iraq when they dispatched wave after human wave of teenage boys to march through minefields, clearing a path with their bodies. Perhaps most tellingly, the plummeting Iranian birthrate—from 6.5 children per woman a generation ago to 1.7 today—suggests that it is not just the regime, but an entire nation, that no longer wishes to live.

No country sets out purposefully to bring about its destruction. And yet history is nothing but the record of nations that have misunderstood the limits of their own power and the resources of their adversaries. Nazi Germany may have been suicidal, but the British Empire was not, and yet at the end of World War II both were finished. No one thinks that the rulers of Athens were irrational, but by the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, their actions had effectively cashiered Athenian democracy.

Jewish leaders between 66 C.E. and 135 C.E. were not irrational, but their revolts against Rome put an end to Jewish sovereignty for two millennia. Furthermore, who is to say that renewing Jewish sovereignty in a sea of Muslim hostility is an entirely rational act? But the rationality of any given government is irrelevant. The question of rationality moves the debate from the real to the speculative—i.e., might a given nation use the bomb at some point? The fact is no one knows beforehand whether any regime is likely to use a nuclear weapon.

The only question American policy-makers should concern themselves with is whether or not a given regime seeking nuclear weapons is already hostile to U.S. interests. If it is, U.S. policy-makers should do everything in their power to prevent that regime from acquiring a bomb. The apparent injustice that Israel has the bomb while the world rues the prospect of a nuclear Iran is a quandary for academics and ethicists—and an entirely inappropriate concern for U.S. officials, whose concerns are much more specific: protecting U.S. citizens, allies, and interests. There is little debate in Washington over Israel’s nuclear-weapons program because Jerusalem has never posed a threat to American strategic interests. Iran, however, has threatened U.S. interests for 30 years.

If or when Iran gets a nuclear weapon, it might drop the bomb on Tel Aviv—or Riyadh, for that matter. But that’s not the main problem. The issue is that Tehran will act in precisely the same fashion as it has since 1979—hostile to the United States and its allies—only now on a much more ambitious scale. And the range of responses available to the United States and its allies will be seriously limited.

Imagine Iran with a nuclear weapon: Tehran will continue to support terror, except that Iranian assets like Hezbollah and Hamas would now be operating under a nuclear umbrella, which will shape Israeli responses. In planning its military strategy, Israel already has to take into consideration world opinion and the strain warfare puts on Israeli society and the economy. Now Jerusalem will have to wonder if crossing the border into Lebanon or Gaza will elicit nuclear threats from Iran.

The Iranians will further extend their reach into Africa and Latin America, where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the midst of a regional tour. Allies like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez will be emboldened to take otherwise unimaginable risks in Washington’s direct sphere of influence in the Americas. The recently unveiled Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington would be only a taste of things to come.

In other words: If Tehran gets a nuclear weapon, will U.S. policy-makers be prepared to ensure that the Islamic Republic doesn’t make good on a threat to close the Strait of Hormuz?

And more recently there was, until this year, Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011) a Palestinian-Israeli poet who lived in Nazareth and ran a souvenir shop. Not as widely celebrated as Amichai, he may be more famous in English than at home, due to Adina Hoffman’s fine 2009 biography in English and the translations into English from Arabic of her husband Peter Cole with Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin. Taha, no less than Amichai, wrote with accessible wit and wisdom about life in this contested place, of which he was a native. Toward the end of his life, he too commanded a large audience at Israeli poetry festivals, in the Hebrew translations of Anton Shammas.

Agi Mishol. (Iris Nesher via Wikimedia Commons)

Currently, the beloved veteran poet Agi Mishol (disclosure: I translated a book-length selection of her poems, Look There, in 2006; she is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry in Hebrew) continues to be extremely popular and draw large crowds. She is often called a successor to the great Israeli women poets Yona Wallach and Dahlia Ravikovitch, with poems as deceptively simple as “Blue Bird”:

On the kitchen
counter

the goat-eyed
cat
carries a blue-feathered
bird
already dead
the beak still
in a pincer grip
on a pomegranate twig

each of us holds
something
in our mouths.

But poetry here, as elsewhere no doubt, is no longer the province of one clearly identifiable artistic elite, and certainly not the province of only a few poetry kings or queens. There are hundreds of poets active in Israel, and they come in all stripes: lyric, protest, experimental, minimalistic, formalist, academic, and others. A poet’s union is forming, and, as the prelude to its first meeting, an open reading was held in the street last month on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard.

Because I am a translator, I know that for poetry to cross language borders, it must have strong content and brilliant or at least surprising thoughts, not the province of all writers, even the very good ones. To stay at home with honor, poetry must touch a local nerve—be sensitive to both language and current affairs—which is a different thing. Since it may very well be true, as Charles Simic said in a famously negative 2007 New York Review of Books essay about Robert Creeley, that “there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading,” this will be a brief journey among excerpts from what I consider excellent poems by poets you have probably never heard of. I make no claim to represent everyone’s taste, just my own. And space limitations will mean that mostly everyone is being left out.

***

I’ll begin with a beginner, a barely published 29-year-old Hebrew poet whose first language is Russian: Johnny Spector. I can’t translate him, as I hesitate to translate rhyme and it is nearly impossible to reproduce consonance and assonance. I find that the words emphasized by the repetition of sounds change so completely in translation that a rhymed translation often loses content, in order to give a pathetic illusion of formal similarity to the original.

To feel the force of its beauty, however, you can read the first line of Spector’s “Poem for Budapest” for yourself in a transliteration of the original Hebrew: “Lah-lekhet beh-mah-seh-khat shah-lehket hah-gashmeem. Blee mah-seem. Beh-lo-mileem.” The poem opens with a scene of walking, after a rain, without really noticing, and without uttering a word, on the piles of fallen leaves that are also masking something. The poet, by the way, is writing a thesis on the ethnic identity of prison wardens in Israel.

Continue reading: Zecharya, Behar, and others

More than a decade ago, on the morning of my 21st birthday, I had a quick coffee at the espresso bar across the street from my apartment in the north of Tel Aviv and then rushed to catch a ride to Jerusalem. In my bag, I had a book, a scarf, and a few changes of underwear. I wouldn’t need much else where I was headed, a filthy patch of concrete across the street from the prime minister’s mansion, where I intended to spend the next week or so on a hunger strike.

The cause mattered much to me back then. It matters less now. It had to do with tuitions and how impossibly pricey they had become, and how a tiny nation dependent on the ingenuity of its people couldn’t afford for its college graduation rates to drop below 50 percent, and how a growing segment of the population, the ultra-Orthodox, paid nothing for their schooling and nothing in taxes and nothing by way of military service. We started off raising these concerns in classrooms, which soon led to daylong strikes. Nothing happened. We took to the streets, and so did the police. It didn’t take much more than a billy club to the shin for many of us to get radicalized. This was in August; by November, we had a plan.

The plan involved starving ourselves in front of Benjamin Netanyahu’s home, demanding an audience. Once granted, we’d present him with our plan for reforming higher education and allowing more of Israel’s disenfranchised to attend college. We had drawn up a detailed proposal, with spreadsheets and hard numbers. It made sense, and so we huddled on the small Jerusalem plaza—settlers and ex-Communists and former officers in elite army units and new immigrants, the well-off and the less-so, all young and optimistic—to change our reality.

We failed. And when we did, I knew I had to leave.

It was hard for me, at the time, to explain why. It’s hard for me still. But reading Clancy Sigal’s 1961 novel, Going Away, I felt again as I did that winter morning when, from my hospital bed—I had eventually collapsed after nearly two weeks without sustenance—I heard that the strike had ended and that our encampment was disbanding and that no gains have been made at all.

To the extent that its plot matters, the largely autobiographical novel—subtitled “A Report, A Memoir”—chronicles the cross-country journey of its narrator, a former radical left-wing activist. The year is 1956, and all across America everyone is voting for Eisenhower. The only thing a former Communist could do, then, is head out to the nearest boat and decamp for Europe. En route, he visits with the comrades of old: the radical poet of West Virginia, the Indian who rages at his ancestors’ policies of appeasement toward the white man, the brilliant youthful thinker turned into a broken tool of the crumbling Communist Party, each of them writhing under the weight of shattered expectations.

Like Saul Silverman. A former union firebrand, he was, by ’56, a rich and fat insurance salesman. “He was grimly determined to hold on to what he had,” Sigal writes, “and not to sacrifice much of it in the name of the death rattles of a moribund movement. Saul had discovered home, children, and family.”

It’s that last sentence that keeps the sentiment from belonging in the dustbin of historical clichés. Saul Silverman is not just the archetypal sobered radical, bitter and caustic; he has a family now, a meaningful life, a happiness that is personal and private. Sigal recognizes this, and the book’s immense appeal lies in its intimate portraits of people drained of their sense of purpose but not of their vitality.

It’s a familiar feeling, I think, for anyone who has ever belonged to a movement, namely that life goes on long after hope had died. And yet, Going Away is, oddly, not a hopeless book. When he finally boards the ship that takes him away to foreign shores, the novel’s narrator, his mind reeling with memory after memory of soured friendships and lost causes, says a sweet farewell to the land that he loves.

“And yet,” he declares, “I loved America. Although I could point to few or none of its parts as justification, I felt ineradicably convinced of the direction of America, of the uncertain majesty of its momentum and yes, even that most dangerous of words, destiny. I was part of that direction, beneficiary, critic. The relationship was too complicated. I had to leave. I had outlived my time, had lived too faithfully according to the code of my generation. A new way of life was appearing in America I was no longer equipped to understand, new qualities I was not equipped to see.”

Call it Sigal’s Law of Movements: Each movement is destined to fail, and yet each movement is destined, in its roaring descent, to provide just enough of a thrust for the next movement to rise.

I didn’t get that at 21. I was too angry, and too hungry, to understand how movements worked. Perhaps I still don’t. But looking at Occupy Wall Street, I feel, alongside my trepidations—at their lack of interest in electoral politics, at their distrust of Democrats and unions and other potential partners for change, at their infatuation with process and rejection of organizational hierarchies—also a wild sense of hope.

Before reading Sigal, I was more inclined to ignore or suppress this strange and uplifting feeling. But the narrator’s stream of consciousness put me in touch with my own, filled as it is with recollections of a few precious political achievements floating in a dark sea of disappointment. Which led to the following realization: By any measurable yardstick, Occupy Wall Street is likely to fail. Most likely, the movement’s aversion to grown-up politics would lead it to clash with both Republicans and Democrats come convention time. It’s not impossible to see Barack Obama pressed by his opponents and his natural inclination toward the center to distance himself from the growingly radical movement and the movement, in turn, robbing the president of support he badly needs to secure his re-election. It’s not unlikely that Occupy’s immense life force will be spent in an endless cycle of internal meetings and inward-facing resolutions, driving it further away from the 99 percent of Americans it purports to represent.

And yet, Occupy’s virtue is merely in its existence. Like physical energy, political energy, too, is always conserved; when one movement fails, the next inherits its vitality and moves on. Occupy’s failure, then, will become the launching pad for some other movement some other time, and the general assembly and its human microphone may become just as much an inspirational icon as Woodstock and its guitars.

Going Away was an underground hit with the activists of the 1960s, and the activists of the 1960s were an underground hit with us in the 1990s. The young hopefuls who camped in tents in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel this summer, demanding change, sometimes cited us as a precedent. Each generation tries. Each generation fails. But there is, to quote an old radical Lubavitcher concept, no fear and no despair with true believers. We carry on. Eventually, we’re certain, we’ll succeed.

Naama Margolese, a shy blonde girl with blue eyes and glasses, became a household name in late December when Channel 2 TV aired a report about the ultra-Orthodox men who regularly taunted her on her walk to school.

In the report, Naama whimpered, “Mom, I’m scared,” as she clutched her mother’s hand during the 300-yard walk from their home to school. In footage, Naama wears skirts to her ankles and covers her shoulders like the rest of the students at her Orthodox school, called Orot, for girls aged 6 to 12. But ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, men call Naama and her friends whores and spit on them. The school’s ultra-Orthodox neighbors told the TV reporters the Orot girls deserved to be sworn at and attacked for violating the Torah’s command to cover up.

Naama’s story is the latest incident of ultra-Orthodox harassment of women to be reported in recent weeks. Days before Channel 2 aired their report, Tanya Rosenblit, a 28-year-old woman from Ashdod, publicized the half-hour standoff that ensued when she refused an ultra-Orthodox man’s demand to move to the back of a public bus from Ashdod to Jerusalem. In September, nine religious male soldiers refused to stay in an auditorium where women were singing during an official military ceremony. In response, the army expelled four of them from their prestigious officers’ course.

Ultra-Orthodox demands on women in the public sphere are not new: In Jerusalem’s insular neighborhood of Mea Shearim, for example, signs imploring female visitors to dress modestly have plastered the stone walls for decades. But in recent years, the calls have radiated out of that Jerusalem shtetl to larger Orthodox sections of Jerusalem and beyond. Health clinics and post offices have begun to hold separate hours for men and women. Advertising agencies have stopped featuring women on billboards in Jerusalem—even after they covered up their models with long sleeves—because fundamentalist Jews would vandalize the signs.

In the past, these stories garnered only minor news coverage. But Naama’s story sparked a public uproar because she is so young, because police seemed to be doing nothing, and because all the lead characters are religious. Late last month, at a conference for Israeli ambassadors in Jerusalem, President Shimon Peres called on Israelis to “save the majority from the talons of the minority.” He added: “We are fighting for the soul of the people and for the substance of the state.”

***

Founded in 1950 by Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria, Romania, Iraq, Iran, and Morocco, Beit Shemesh’s old city is full of the stucco-sided public-housing blocks typical of ’50s Israeli construction. It was once a mostly traditional or Orthodox town, but in the last two decades, more stringent ultra-Orthodox newcomers have moved in from Jerusalem.

These new ultra-Orthodox residents tended to congregate in their own neighborhoods. They postered public walls with pashkevilim, large block-print Hebrew papers that are vital media for people who shun mainstream Israeli TV, radio, and print news. On a sidewalk near a synagogue, they put up signs asking women to cross to the other side of the street and not to stop to chat because doing so would attract undue attention from the pious. On buses that run through their neighborhoods, the ultra-Orthodox have managed to impose an unofficial rule that women must sit in the back. Beit Shemesh is also home to a new, tiny sect of ultra-conservative women who cover up in the style of the most observant Muslim women, from head to toe.

Continue reading: ‘We don’t want to live here like in Tehran.’

Had you asked us six years ago where we dreamed of raising a family, we’d have answered “Israel” without hesitation. But recently we’ve begun to doubt whether we should raise her in the Jewish state.

It’s not the escalating situation with Iran that gives us pause, or the fact that our daughter will one day serve in the army: We decided to live in Israel with full knowledge of the security threats it faces. The reason we are concerned about raising a daughter here is that the government is standing by as war is waged against girls and women.

Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Orthodox have had the power to decide who is a Jew and how a Jew can live and die by controlling the mechanisms of marriage, divorce, and burial. What this means practically is that the government body that oversees all major life-cycle events—as well as regulating food production—is a religious institution, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

Orthodox religious law is the law of the land: Only a man can marry a woman, only a man can grant a divorce. And because of Orthodoxy’s systemic exclusion of women from positions of power—its refusal to allow women to be rabbis, or to recognize female Reform and Conservative rabbis—the interests of women have been disregarded.

The Orthodoxy of the rabbinate has caused friction in Israel before, but the well-publicized events of recent weeks have brought tensions to a boil. Though some had heard of the gender-segregated public buses now common in cities like Beit Shemesh, the other incidents of discrimination against women and girls came as shock: a 28-year-old woman asked to ride in the back of a public bus, an 8-year-old child called a “whore” and spat on by grown men, and a gynecological convention that barred women speakers. These incidents, carried out by ultra-Orthodox Israelis and tolerated by the ultra-Orthodox leadership, provided the majority of Israelis with clear evidence that the rabbinate’s power has helped create a rotten attitude toward women in major segments of Israeli society.

If this sort of discriminatory behavior were isolated in a few neighborhoods of the country, it would be a shame, but we would hesitate to tell others how to live their lives. Increasingly, though, it’s not isolated, and the discrimination and marginalization of women are tacitly permitted by the state. If we allow this trend to continue, Israel will cease to exist as a strong and vibrant democracy.

***

Due to Israel’s coalition-based government system, where coalition partners are given control over ministries in return for voting as a bloc, governments from David Ben-Gurion’s to Benjamin Netanyahu’s have preferred to add an ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist party to their coalition rather than create a coalition without parties such as United Torah Judaism. Such a non-ultra-Orthodox coalition could, in one vote, break the rabbinate’s power. But the major parties are stuck in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma: Each party fears that if it votes against Orthodox control, while the other does not, the Orthodox would ally with the opposition to crush it. So, the status quo persists.

Young Maccabee girls in their camp in Zikhron Ya’akov, 1939. (Library of Congress)

In this context, our daughter will not be considered Jewish by the state. That’s because Erin’s mother had Conservative Jewish conversion in Canada before Erin was born, and because we decided it was insulting to ask Erin, who lived her whole life as a Jew, to “convert” just because a state-employed rabbi decided she is not Jewish enough.

We could not be married in Israel because of Erin’s official lack of Jewishness, despite the fact that we are observant Jews who keep Shabbat and a kosher home. (Our marriage certificate is from the state of Illinois.) Likewise, our daughter could in the future be legally barred from marrying the person she loves in Israel. If the laws continue as they are, the two of us will not be able to be buried in the same state-run cemetery, and our daughter would be excluded from burial in a Jewish cemetery when her life is spent. She’ll be a citizen, just as we are, and she’ll serve in the army, just as Ariel did. But if the status quo persists, she will go from cradle to grave knowing that in the eyes of the government of the state of Israel she is not a Jew.

For us, nothing is more painful. Our grandparents devoted their lives to supporting the state and its establishment, and we’ve devoted ours to building Israeli organizations that have connected thousands to Israel. But all of that is irrelevant in the eyes of the bearded men who have power over critical aspects of the lives of this country’s 6 million Jews.

This is not what the pioneers who founded this state worked toward, and it isn’t what generations of Diaspora Jews fought for.

***

It is time that the world Jewish community knew about this systemic bias in Israel—and time for Diaspora Jewry to act. It is amazing to think that while American Jews raise money for the state, lobby their political representatives to support Israel, and send their children on Birthright, the rabbinate denies the Jewishness of many of these Diaspora Jews.

This schism between who is a Jew in the Diaspora and who is considered a Jew by the state of Israel will only grow, considering that more than a quarter of Jewish students entering the first grade in Israel this year are ultra-Orthodox, as Dan Ben-David, director of the Taub Center in Jerusalem, has noted. This means that if we want Israel to be a Jewish state for all the Jewish people, as well as a democratic state that respects the individual rights of its citizens, we have a small window to break the Orthodox monopoly on the Israel’s core institutions.

Next year’s Israeli election is the perfect opportunity for the American Jewish community—and the rest of Diaspora Jewry—to act. Diaspora leaders need to demand from the leadership of the Israeli political parties that they make liberalization of the rabbinate a priority. It’s no secret that Israel’s political leaders and Israeli government programs depend on financial and political support from Diaspora Jews.

The Jewish Federations of North America, the Jewish Agency, the United Jewish Appeal, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish National Fund, and so on, should give the Israeli government a 90-day window to enact legislation to protect the rights of women and the non-Orthodox. Jerry Silverman, Sheldon Adelson, Howard Kohr, Ron Lauder, and other leaders of powerful Diaspora Jewish groups: Enough with the back-room diplomacy. It is time for Jewish leaders, especially in the United States, to make it clear that no money or lobbying support will flow to the government of Israel, or government-sponsored programs, if the state’s official institutions discriminate against non-Orthodox Jews. No pluralism and no recognition of women’s rights equals no cash and no lobbying support.

Our grandparents, parents, and peers did not work so hard or sacrifice so much to be judged unfit by official representatives of the government of Israel because of the crime of being Modern Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. Our women do not deserve to sit in the back of buses, or to be spat on by those who cover themselves in black from head to toe. We need to use the means at our disposal to pressure the state to protect the future of the Jewish people. Our daughters demand it.

CORRECTION, January 9: This article originally stated that close to 50 percent of Jewish students entering first grade in Israel this year are ultra-Orthodox. In fact, the number is 27 percent. The error has been corrected.

It’s not as preposterous a comparison as you might think. After all, if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was ever made into a movie, it would have to be a romantic comedy.

Like all romantic comedies, this one begins with two protagonists who meet and despise each other, while all along their attraction and compatibility is evident to everyone else. If An Affair to Remember is before your time, think of Israel as Harry, obnoxious and spouting bombastic theories about life (and also Jewish!), and of the Palestinians as Sally, sensitive and insistent on fairness and decorum (and also not Jewish!). If only he gave back a bit of land, and she got rid of her crazy, crazy girlfriend Hamas (played by Carrie Fisher), they could finally be together and spend eternity doing the things they both love to do, like shopping at the Gap in Jerusalem.

But we’ve an entire reel to fill, and so the lovers cannot be united right away. First, they must overcome a series of sweet and preposterous challenges, like dating the other’s best friend or insisting the other recognize his right to be a Jewish state. She shallowly responds to courtship, he responds by building more settlements; the final embrace is postponed yet again, leaving us agitated but hopeful.

Israel, Palestine, here’s a word of advice: when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

Israeli, Palestinian Envoys Agree to Meet Again in Jordan Next Week [Haaretz]
Jerusalem Announces Contentious Construction Ahead of Peace Talks Meet [Haaretz]
Earlier: Israeli-Palestinian ‘Meeting’ Today in Jordan

Lebanon’s Maronite community has long been the region’s Christian citadel. “It used to be that when Christians around the region looked at the situation in Lebanon, it cheered them,” Elie Fawaz, a Lebanese political analyst, told me this week in Beirut. “They saw that here the Christians were equal to their Muslim counterparts. They were citizens and had the same rights as Muslims.” The citadel is now tottering. If Lebanon once served as a beacon for the region’s other Christians, the dimming of this light is making Christians in unstable countries like Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and Egypt even more vulnerable.

Lebanon’s Christian community comprises up to a third of the country’s total population. It is made up largely of Maronites but also includes Greek Orthodox and a number of other sects, like Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Greek Catholic, and Roman Catholic. Christians were likely never a majority in Lebanon, and yet, says Fawaz, a Greek Orthodox, “the Christians didn’t act like a minority. They pushed their vision for an independent and sovereign Lebanese state.”

Historically, Lebanese Christians have provided some of the region’s most influential intellectual leaders, like Charles Malik, who helped write the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Michel Chiha, one of the authors of Lebanon’s 1926 Constitution. In the wake of Lebanon’s independence in 1943, the Christian vision was to build a sovereign state that would bring political and cultural modernity to the country and, eventually, to the broader Middle East.

That project stalled for a number of reasons. First, there was the relative demographic decline of the Christians in the post-independence period, due to the accelerated birth rates of Sunnis and Shiites. The French authorities that oversaw Lebanon during the mandate period created a power-sharing agreement that allotted Christians 50 percent of the parliament—the other 50 percent was split between Shia and Sunnis—and this struck Lebanon’s growing Muslim population as unfair. Most significantly, in addition to these domestic problems, the Christians were unable to protect Lebanon from the region’s furies, which culminated in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that pitted a number of different domestic players, as well as regional and international actors, against one another.

One of the main causes of that 15-year conflagration was the support of Lebanese Sunnis for the Palestinian cause, which attached these Sunnis to a larger Arab regional identity with a shared goal of eradicating Israel. The Sunni community’s political, diplomatic, and financial support of the Palestinians set them squarely against the Maronites, who resisted turning Lebanon into a forward operating base for the P.L.O. They sought to preserve their vision of a Lebanon free from the region’s destructive political currents and to avoid the Israeli reprisals they rightly feared.

What’s instructive is that the Christians fought in the war. “In 1975, mothers sent their kids to fight the Palestinians,” says Fawaz. “They had a vision for Lebanon.”

That changed when political calculation and greed shifted Christians’ focus from their war against the P.L.O. and Yasser Arafat’s allies to each other. The Christians split into different factions that faced off during the civil war. Two decades after the end of the war, the Christians are still plagued by this fissure, and they are still represented by the same political leaders who took them to war against one another more than 20 years ago. The result, says Fawaz, “is that today the Christians have no vision. They are definitely a numerical minority and acting like one—reactive and fearful.”

The Christian community here is suffering from a number of symptoms of minority psychosis. Consider that the head of the Maronite church has spoken out in defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Patriarch Beshara Butros Rai called Assad “open-minded” in a September interview. “I am hoping Assad will be given more chances to implement the reforms he already launched,” Rai added. An unfortunately all-too-typical Christian fear and hatred of Sunnis has convinced many Lebanese Christians—as well as Syrian ones—that only Damascus’ Alawite minority regime can protect the region’s Christians from Sunni Islamists.

Obviously, a regime that has slaughtered protesters for almost a year hardly embodies the sort of values promoted in the gospel, or warrants the faith of a cleric. But more to the point: This is the same Syrian regime that waged an open-ended campaign of terror against Lebanon’s Christians starting in 2005. Christian politicians and journalists were assassinated; bombs detonated in Christian regions of the country. And the official head of Lebanon’s Christian community is now appealing to Assad for protection?

The Maronites had always distinguished themselves as among the region’s most stubbornly independent of confessional sects. But fear, resentment, and short-sighted political calculation have led them today to seek protection and patronage from the Middle East’s most dangerous and retrograde elements: Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Recently, Fawaz explains, senior church officials came out in favor of the arms of Hezbollah’s Islamic resistance. “The Maronite church,” Fawaz says, “has taken a position defending the party that stands accused of killing the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.” Fear has compelled the Christians to abandon logic as well as moral scruple.

In the aftermath of the February 2005 assassination of Hariri, Damascus withdrew its troops from Lebanon after almost 30 years. That represented a golden opportunity for the country’s Christians. “They’d been resisting Syrian hegemony in order to regain a free and independent Lebanon,” Fawaz says. “With Syria out, the Christians had what they always said they wanted: Sunni leadership that had a Lebanon-first policy.” Some Christian parties did ally themselves with the largest Sunni party, led by the late Hariri’s son Saad. But the majority, under the leadership of Michel Aoun, the former head of the Lebanese army, partnered with Hezbollah instead.

In other words, today’s Christians seem less motivated by their vision of an independent Lebanon than by their hatred of the Sunnis. It’s true that Lebanese Christians, like other minority groups here, including the Shiites, suffered terrible persecution at the hands of the Sunnis, who for centuries treated them as second-class citizens (at best). But Lebanon’s current Sunni leaders are not Ottomans, never mind jihadists. Like the Christians themselves, the Sunni leadership here promotes liberal values and a liberalized economy.

By openly siding against the Sunnis and allying with Hezbollah—and by extension Iran—the Christians have let identity politics and ideology, rather than interests and values, drive policy. The Sunnis are the regional majority, and no matter what sort of revolutionary project Iran has in store for the Middle East, the Sunnis aren’t going anywhere.

The question for the Christians is how to respond to the upheavals that have reshaped the region over the last year. Lebanon’s Christian population has the power to set the agenda for the rest of their regional co-religionists. Either they can identify and work with those Sunnis who share their same vision for Lebanon and the rest of the region, or they can let ancient wounds dictate a strategy of resentment that will ensure their demise.

Those inclined to discount the possibility of a Christian-free Middle East would do well to remember that Jews, in the recent past, had a significant place in the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Were it not for the birth of a sovereign Jewish state that took in Jewish refugees thrown out by countries that turned against them, this regional minority might well have disappeared half a century ago. Without an Israel of their own, if the Christians don’t get it right their era in the Middle East may be coming to an end.

Continue reading: Newt Gingrich, kneydel

The settler youth currently busy setting things on fire across the West Bank aren’t big readers. Instead of curling up with a good book, they’d rather engage in more virile pastimes, like vandalizing the homes of their ideological nemeses or smashing senior IDF officers in the face with bricks. Their facility with words is limited to taglines, and the one they chose to describe their recent spree of arsons and beatings is “price tag,” as in making others pay for any infraction, real or perceived, against unquestioned Jewish control over Judea and Samaria. But we’re not too far removed from New Year’s Eve and its customary resolutions to offer another one for the list: This year, the young brutes should read Michael Kohlhaas.

Written in 1811 by Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas has many charms that make it a thoroughly attractive read for contemporary audiences. But even if they don’t care much for its existentialism avant la lettre or its incisive psychological portraits, the rioting settlers might appreciate the work’s main theme: revenge.

Loosely based on real-life events, this novella tells the story of a wealthy horse-dealer who, having failed to obtain justice in court against a cruel and well-connected aristocrat, raises a private army and embarks on a violent crusade before being apprehended and executed. The novella’s emotional crescendo arrives when Martin Luther, in an attempt to stop Kohlhaas’ madness, writes him a scathing letter: “You who say you are sent to wield the sword of justice,” roars the father of the Reformation, “what are you doing, presumptuous man, in the madness of your blind fury, you who are yourself filled with injustice from head to foot? Because the sovereign to whom you owe obedience had denied you your rights, rights in a quarrel over a miserable possession, you rise up, wretch, with fire and sword and, like a wolf of the desert, descend on the peaceful community he protects.”

Most readers are likely to identify with Luther’s scolding and yet still feel even stronger sympathy for Kohlhaas. Like him, we want to believe that justice is absolute, and that we have the right to pursue it to the very end, earthly consequences be damned. Naturally enamored with this theme, Franz Kafka devoted one of the only two public talks he gave to reading segments of Kohlhaas, and he confessed that he could not think of the novella “without being moved to tears and enthusiasm.”

Such were von Kleist’s powers that, writing at the cradle of modernity, he had already detected that vengeance would become the chief sentiment guiding the new age of man. With Luther having loosened the cornerstones of the church, and with the Enlightenment following suit and gilding “the natural and imprescriptible rights of man,” the individual was left with nothing much greater than himself to revere. And with justice newly rooted in the social contract or judged on the scale of actions and their consequences, a hard man like Kohlhaas—searching for justice in its former transcendent seats, the church and the state, and finding both small and tattered—was bound to slip into vengeance. Writing not long after von Kleist, Hegel called revenge “a positive action of a particular will,” by which he meant to say that anyone who, like Michael Kohlhaas or the settler youth, embarked on a campaign of retribution in the name of some exalted, religious ideal was bound to discover that they were really pursuing the narrowest of private interests.

It’s one of those sweet paradoxes that make life so rich and strange: If you truly believe in justice, you know that its origins—like the origins of love and faith and mercy and mirth and valor and hate—are divine, and that it is therefore, in its pure form, largely unknowable to us. If we turn any one of these emotions into the singular banner under which we march, we’re bound to become, like poor Kohlhaas, doomed and distasteful fanatics.

It is a testament to the impoverishment of our time that we too mindlessly brand many of those who follow in Kohlhaas’ steps as conservatives. From lawless Israeli settlers dedicated to erecting a theocratic kingdom to listless U.S. Republicans devoted to little more than dethroning President Barack Obama, the right everywhere nowadays seems to be primarily about revenge. Often, this sentiment is excused as serving some sort of greater good, but von Kleist knew better: Revenge is always personal.

Which, in part, explains why so many in Israel and the United States now observe the right wing with bafflement. Conservatives, we were told by commentators from Edmund Burke forward, value the well-being of society over the grievances of individuals, and they champion slow processes over tempestuous eruptions. But instead we are now plagued with a twisted ideology that is willing to lay waste all that we share and cherish in the service of absolutist fantasies that can be achieved only once real or imagined slights are punished.

If we can learn anything from Michael Kohlhaas, it is that modernity needs an antidote to vengeance. And we can find that in Judaism.

Observed as it was written and practiced for millennia—a version radically different from the bastardized form now practiced by the chauvinistic maniacs who make up the vanguard of the settlers’ movement—Judaism is as clear as it can be on the subject of revenge. It understood, long before John Stuart Mill, that men see only consequences; asking them to turn the other cheek won’t do much good if they’re denied what they believe to be their fair share of the pie. To that end, Judaism largely prefers concrete systems of laws to ephemeral ideas like forgiveness and good will. Paul’s declaration that Christ is the end of the law, then, is, in some ways, a misguided criticism of Judaism: Rather than choosing law over love, Judaism knows that the former is impossible without the latter because human beings, left unfettered, will eventually turn all relations into contests of will. To keep them from hearing voices and embarking on crusades for what they imagine to be celestial causes, they need to be fenced in by rules.

Which makes von Kleist’s book urgent reading: Anyone who thinks that revenge is a good political, moral, militaristic, or economic strategy is welcome to check out how well the same philosophy worked for Michael Kohlhaas.

• The United States is trying to articulate exactly which “red lines” would prompt a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, in an effort to dissuade Israel from acting on its own. [The Daily Beast]

• A prominent Syrian activist in exile has called for humanitarian intervention. His request won’t be the last. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• Photographer Lynsey Addario, who while pregnant was harassed at a Gaza checkpoint, gave birth this morning. [Twitter]

• Now we have the head of Iran’s navy mentioning that it would be really easy to close the Strait of Hormuz. Gulp. [AP/WP]

• In Brooklyn’s Hasidic enclaves, the Beit Shemesh conflict with the anti-women ultra-Orthodox is seen primarily as a shanda fur die Goyim. [Haaretz]

• The prominent Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler died at 83. [NYT]

• Hamas and Fatah are best friends again, unless you want to celebrate Fatah’s anniversary in Gaza, and then Hamas won’t let you. [JPost]

• A Tunisian-French Jew lobbies for Yad Vashem to include her savior as the first “righteous” person who is Arab. [NYT]

• Paul Berger continues his reporting on George Washington’s letter to the Rhode Island synagogue with a profile of the document’s reclusive owner, Richard Morgenstern. [Forward]

• Former yeshiva kid Brett Ratner led Hanukkah services for all the rich celebrities on St. Barts. [Page Six]

Maybe the most cogent explanation Matisyahu has offered yet for his sudden, recent change from being Hasidic. Hint: still a little confusing.

In the early 1990s, Fuchs, then working as an oil trader in New York, developed a plan to build a pipeline to transport oil and gas from the newly free and resource-rich regions of the former Soviet Union. Through a Georgian-born member of the Israeli Knesset, Fuchs met a variety of officials in the country’s new government. In 1993, he won a 30-year exclusive concession from Georgia to develop an energy transportation network to carry the Georgian oil and gas westward from the Caspian Sea to Europe, potentially earning him tens of millions of dollars.

At the time Fuchs signed the contract, the small country in the Caucusus was one of the most corrupt in the former Soviet Union; basic things like the rule of law and sanctity of legal contracts had not yet been established. But the potential windfall was huge—and Fuchs thought he had the right connections. Yet when a new government led by former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze came to power in 1995, it quickly canceled all previous energy contracts in order to make deals with larger, multinational companies.

Fuchs hired Kissinger Associates to help him recoup his claim. In January 2003, Henry Kissinger himself wrote to Shevardnadze. “Shevardnadze accepted what Dr. Kissinger wrote to him and everything was on the verge of solution,” Fuchs told an arbitration panel that later ruled on his case. But in November 2003, the Rose Revolution, which brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power in Georgia, interrupted the process. While Saakashvili promised to clean up Georgia’s image as a post-Soviet backwater, he apparently had little interest in resolving the Fuchs dispute. So in 2007, Fuchs brought a complaint for the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, an autonomous body affiliated with the World Bank. In March 2010, it ruled that the Georgian government owed Fuchs $102 million, a sum that represented forgone profits and legal costs.

But Georgia refused to pay. And so senior officials in the Georgian Finance Ministry in Tbilisi, the capital, decided on an easier and cheaper way to settle the matter: Nab Fuchs in a sting operation. As Paul M. Barrett reported in a story for Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year, a Georgian Finance Ministry official tasked with working as intermediary between Fuchs and the Georgian government reported to his superiors in early September 2010 that he had made contact with a “Jew businessman acting in Georgia [who] had tight relations with Rony Fuchs.” The “Jew businessman” was Ze’ev Frenkiel, a former employee of Fuchs’ living in Georgia.

Less than two weeks later, Frenkiel arranged a meeting between the Finance Ministry official and Fuchs at an Istanbul hotel. In a conversation secretly recorded by the Georgians, Fuchs agreed to a $72 million settlement if the Georgian government promised not to appeal the arbitration decision, with the expectation that he would return $7 million of the sum to the country’s deputy finance minister as a kickback. The October dinner in Batumi, thrown by the Georgian Finance Ministry, would finalize the deal.

It didn’t go down that way. Right before the signing ceremony, Fuchs and Frenkiel were placed under arrest, interrogated, and thrown into jail.

***

Fuchs, now 61, retained President Barack Obama’s former White House counsel Gregory B. Craig and Geoffrey Robertson, a prominent British lawyer who represents WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He would need the best defense money could buy: 99.96 percent of defendants in Tbilisi courts are convicted. According to Fuchs’ lawyers, a Georgian official had told the Israeli ambassador to Georgia that the convictions would be dismissed if Fuchs would give up his claim to the $100 million. Fuchs refused. “We are being held hostage here, and the Georgian government wants a $100 million ransom,” he said in January to a reporter attending the trial, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. “We will not pay it.” Up until this point, Georgia and Israel had had generally positive relations; a sizable number of Georgian Jews lives in the Jewish state. But both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman unsuccessfully lobbied the Georgian government on behalf of their imprisoned countrymen. In April 2011, Fuchs and Frenkiel were found guilty of bribery and given prison sentences of seven and six-and-a-half years, respectively.

Yet three weeks ago, on Dec. 2, after the two businessmen had spent some 14 months in jail, Saakashvili announced that he had pardoned the two businessmen. Immediately after the men were released, Peres called the Georgian president. “I know this was your personal decision,” Peres said, according to the Jerusalem Post. “It was a generous gesture and I have tremendous respect for it.” Saakashvili repaid the praise, issuing a statement: “This episode was difficult and uncomfortable for both sides, and I am happy it has ended.” Peres, he added, is a “big friend of Georgia.”

Continue reading: A Georgia-Israel alliance

Unsurprisingly, Gingrich’s comments set off a firestorm. Some thought his observations were refreshingly honest, others argued they were needlessly provocative and extremely counterproductive. But as many commentators have noted, the Palestinians are one of many peoples whose nationhood is “invented.” In the Middle East alone, invented nations include Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, and even Turkey. Like the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, these, too, were all once part of the Ottoman Empire. None existed before World War I, after which these jerry-built states united various, and often competing, sectarian, ethnic, and tribal identities.

The real question, then, is not whether Palestinian nationalism is “authentic,” but whether this particular national fiction is useful. Gingrich’s proposed alternative identity for the Palestinians—linking these Arabic-speaking, non-Jewish residents of the territories to the rest of the “the Arab people”—is bad for the region, the United States, and Israel.

The problem is that current Palestinian nationalism is not strong enough. If it were, Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas might have been more inclined to accept the peace deals offered by Israeli prime ministers and American presidents. If Palestinian leadership were more like the early champions of Zionism, who wanted a state for the Jews no matter its size, then the conflict might have been resolved at any point over the last seven decades.

Maybe the Palestinians are still waiting for a better deal. Perhaps, as some argue, the Palestinians really believe that they’ll eventually manage to drive the Jews into the sea. In any case, one of the major problems is that the decision has never been entirely in the hands of the Palestinians. Even before the United Nations partition plan of 1947, there have always been external regional forces trying to prevent a resolution to the Palestinian problem, since prolonging the conflict enhances their prestige and bargaining position.

From the 1930s to the present, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iran have wrestled over the Palestinian file. Those states’ rationale for interfering in the domestic affairs of a foreign people is based on the presumption of a shared pan-Arab or pan-Islamic sensibility. But even assuming that all Arabs and Muslims really do care an awful lot about the Palestinians—though the status of Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab states and as the paltry financial aid provided by oil-producing Muslim states strongly suggest otherwise—the notion that U.S. policy should accommodate regional forces because they claim to share a common identity with Palestinians is dangerous.

A region-wide contest to represent the Palestinians not only sets regional powers against each other, but it also channels their often destructive energies against Western interlocutors, primarily the United States. Through 1973, the Saudis fought for their role with their weapon of choice: oil. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria’s Assad regime use terrorism, just as Gamal abd el-Nasser did when he ruled Egypt. Therefore, a key goal of American policy-making has been to de-link the Palestinian file from other regional issues and to have the Palestinians represented by one agent: themselves.

Gingrich’s vague formulation cuts directly against the grain of the U.S. regional strategy. If the Palestinians aren’t a nation, which is the Arab nation that American officials are supposed to deal with regarding the Palestinians? Or, more vaguely yet, who is the representative of the “Arab people”? Is Gingrich referring to that entity imagined by the ideologues of Arab nationalism, a single and unified Arab nation?

It should be clear to even the most casual observer of the Middle East that the Arabs are anything but unified. Iraq’s conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, as we now understand, was only the tip of the iceberg in a region where civil war is not an exception but the norm. The Bahraini and Syrian uprisings are effectively sectarian revolutions against the established, and repressive, orders. Even in Egypt, Muslim violence against the Coptic Christian community reveals the true sectarian nature of the region.

The theorists behind 20th-century Arab nationalism recognized the region’s sectarianism and tribalism—which is why they proposed an identity based not on sect or tribe but rather on shared attributes, like language. The inhabitants of the region, from Western North Africa to the Persian Gulf, all spoke some variation of Arabic, thus they were Arabs. Their particularities, whether ethnic (Kurdish, for instance) or sectarian (Christian, Shia, etc.) were insignificant in comparison to their Arab identity. According to ideologues like Sati’ al-Husri, they were Arabs whether they liked it or not.

Accordingly, Arab nationalism has been a coercive and repressive doctrine. Even though it was an idea intended to forestall the civil strife that arises from competing identities, in reality enforcing Arab nationalism has led to bloodshed throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Under Saddam Hussein, Arab nationalism meant Sunni supremacism and the violent suppression of Kurds and Shiites. In Syria, the minority Alawite regime has used the doctrine to keep the Sunnis as well as the Kurds in line. In Lebanon, Hezbollah waves the banner of Arab nationalism in its fight against the Zionist entity, in order to intimidate and rule over other Lebanese sects. Violence and repression are key components of Arab nationalism, because as a totalitarian ideology like Communism and Nazism, it can brook no differences, no particularity.

Respecting that particularity is not only good for the inhabitants of the region but also for the interests of the United States and Israel. The United States has bilateral relations with other nation-states and political institutions like the Palestinian Authority. But this country is ill-equipped to deal with large amorphous bodies like the “Arab people” or, alternatively, the “Muslim world.”

The latter was the intended recipient of Obama’s Cairo speech in June 2009. Unfortunately, it seems not to have occurred to the president that the Muslim-majority Middle East comprises various Muslim sects often at odds, plus non-Muslims as well. By employing this particular fiction, the “Muslim world,” the Cairo speech happened to comport perfectly with the belief of Islamists who hold that non-Muslims and even Shiite Muslims are second-class subjects in the Sunni-majority Middle East, rather than individuals deserving of equal rights.

The “Arab people,” like the “Muslim world,” is an invention—and neither of them should hold much appeal for U.S. policy-makers. Given the nature of our own polity, Americans should take the lead promoting particular identities, even if some of them are formed more recently than others, like that of the Palestinians. This makes them no less worthy of the rights and respect due to other Middle Eastern identities, some of them ancient, like Egypt’s Christian community, or the region’s Jewish minority, which after being ruled by the Ottomans and other regional empires and powers, now enjoys its own state in Israel.

One thing I’ve heard in informal conversations with several prominent Jewish Republicans is a comparison of Obama, whom they accuse of having no feel for Israel, to President Clinton, whose love of the country and kinship with the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin were undeniable and conspicuous. Allison’s reporting further bears this out:

visuals and rhetoric—the kishkes factor—have taken on outsized importance. Here, too, Obama has an unusually thorny political problem: the specter of Bill Clinton, specifically of Bill Clinton in a kippah, weeping for Yitzhak Rabin with the words, “Shalom, haver.” “We have the record against the aesthetics here,” said David Saperstein, executive director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center. “The Clinton-Rabin relationship was something extraordinarily special, and it set a very high bar.” It’s a gap Republican partisans know they do well to exploit. “I’ve been asked, ‘Who is the best friend Israel has in the White House?’ ” Fred Zeidman, a Houston oil executive who handled Jewish outreach for McCain and is now assisting the Romney campaign, told me last week. “And I say, ‘Hillary Clinton.’ This is the woman who kissed Suha Arafat. But that’s why, I hate to say it, she’s the best we’ve got.”

Here, too, the facts tell a different story:

The truth is that aside from Clinton and Rabin, no recent president has had that kind of chemistry with a leader of Israel. Reagan paid tribute at a German cemetery at Bitburg that included the graves of SS soldiers, drawing promises from Rabin and then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres that the Jewish people would never forgive him. The first George Bush went to blows with Yitzhak Shamir over the government’s settlement policy, and George W. Bush, with a major assist from his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, forced the catastrophic miscalculation that allowed Hamas to hijack Gaza’s elections in the wake of Ariel Sharon’s 2005 pullout. Bill Clinton, for his part, actually sent his own star political advisers—James Carville and Stan Greenberg—to Israel in 1999 to work for the defeat of [current Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, then a sitting prime minister, in favor of Ehud Barak and the Labor Party. “Excuse me,” said David Luchins, a longtime aide to the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Obama is no better, and no worse.”

But that may not matter, and if it doesn’t, Obama in part has himself to blame.

United Jewish Appeal [Tablet Magazine]

Ron Paul has gained ground after a debate in which his refusal to join the Iran warhawks was front and center. Indeed, in my travels around the country, I don’t meet many neoconservatives outside of Washington and New York. It’s one thing to just adore Israel, as the evangelical Christians do; it’s another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel’s national security.

I read this and thought it fairly remarkable. Was he saying Ron Paul was preferable to the rest of the Republican field? And that “yet again” was even more bizarre. I wanted to press Klein and ask him if he meant what he seemed to be saying: not only that an attack on Iran would be fought “for Israel’s national security” but that this would not be the first time—presumably, that Iraq was the same thing. The notion that Iraq was invaded for Israel’s sake, I personally believe, feeds into some of the weirdest and least accurate theories of Jewish neoconservatives pushing George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld into an ill-advised war.

Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeff Goldberg noticed the same thing and had also emailed Klein, and our emails prompted Klein to respond. As in an email to me, he said that we were misunderstanding his “yet again” (“Jeff had jumped to a silly conclusion,” he wrote; I think the notion that it’s a silly conclusion is itself silly). He then expanded on his beliefs, arguing that while there were Jewish neocons pushing for the Iraq war, they were not actually responsible for it (he fingers Cheney, as would I). All in all, I think Klein’s original post was sloppy at best and likely pretty intemperate; and while his follow-up is helpful, language like “Israel First/Likudnik bloviators,” specifically in reference to people who aren’t actually Israeli or actually members or primary supporters of Israel’s Likud Party, makes me uncomfortable, conjuring as it does charges of dual loyalty that Jews really shouldn’t have to hear anymore.

But I know why Klein feels, as it seems he does, like his back is against the wall, and why he would be frustrated by “the crazed intolerance of many right-wing Jewish commentators.” I brought up in my email with him the fact that no less than Michael Oren had responded to Thomas Friedman’s column last week, with its already-notorious “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” line. [UPDATE: Friedman clarified the line today.] “This allegation is profoundly disturbing,” Oren said. Whether or not he’s right, Oren is not an intellectual-without-portfolio (anymore). He is Israel’s official envoy to the United States. If criticism of Israeli policy—even when, as in Friedman’s case (or Douglas David J. Rothkopf’s, or Joe Klein’s), it is sloppy, or intemperate, or even worse—garners you an official condemnation from the Israeli government as well as the wrath of ostensibly nonpartisan PACs as well as accusations of anti-Semitism, then we are looking at a stifling of debate that isn’t in the interests of anyone except the Jewish right, which is attempting to turn Israel into a wedge issue in the American Jewish community.

I’m not sure Elliott Abrams warrants the label “sometimes, a feckless shmuck,” which is what Klein called him after this post. But I do wish Abrams had restricted himself to disagreeing with Klein and Friedman on the policies rather than bringing up the blood libel; and what I really wish is that he had urged his readers to, you know, disagree with Klein and agree with him rather than urged various Jewish institutions to rescind their awards and generally cut Friedman and Klein off.

We have a long election year ahead of us, and it could be a useful occasion of hashing out differences on the Mideast. Who knows, if it’s done right, a new consensus—more to the right or to the left of the current one—may actually emerge. But poorly chosen, sloppy, and just plain clownish accusations (and then defenses that are predicated on comma placement) as well as responses that head straight for anti-Semitism and call for communal shunning are not going to get it done.

(By the way, I tried to find a clip of Samuel L. Jackson telling everyone in Do The Right Thing to cool that shit out, but none are embeddable. But the line is “Y’all need to chill that shit out! And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.”)

15 Days Til Iowa: Travel Day [Time Swampland]
Clarification: Israel’s National Security [Time Swampland]
Israeli Officials Escalate War of Words With N.Y. Times [JTA]
Blaming the Jews—Again [Weekly Standard Blog]
Earlier: Ron Paul Moves Into Iowa Lead

And yet, the conservative chair never materialized—a fact that came as a disappointment, if not a surprise, to some. Although American Judaism’s largest religious denomination prides itself on being a big tent—part of HUC’s mission statement is to apply “the open and pluralistic spirit of the Reform movement to the study of the great issues of Jewish life and thought”—certain students and observers are sensing a troubling trend that directly contradicts this vision, particularly on the matter of Israel.

“While I loved my time there and deeply respected my professors, I found that HUC was not comfortable exploring or discussing anything politically that wasn’t left,” said Rabbi Samantha Kahn, who received her ordination from Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles in 2011 and is now the assistant rabbi at Congregation Emanu El in Houston, Texas. “I definitely struggled with it, and I was hurt by the lack of openness and the anger toward positions of center and right when it came to Israel and foreign affairs.”

To be sure, most observers point out that the political atmosphere at HUC does not comprehensively reflect the reality of the wider Reform movement. But the differences can sometimes be unusually stark. Kahn, who worked at the Hillel at the University of Miami before entering HUC, recently recalled the “strange transition” she experienced: “As a Hillel professional, it seemed that I was [politically] very left. All of a sudden, at HUC I wasn’t left anymore, but very right. The truth is, being in Houston, I feel more left again. I pay attention to the New Israel Fund and read Haaretz. But I’m also still involved with and appreciative of AIPAC and Hadassah and am glad to see them still thriving in Houston. At HUC, AIPAC and Hadassah were four-letter words. They were the devil.”

HUC—like all educational institutions—is a bubble of sorts, and it is often difficult to find genuine ideological pluralism inside any such closed environment, especially on a subject as complicated as Israel. Nevertheless, some have grown concerned about the ways the political culture of HUC could influence the future texture of Reform Judaism and the broader American Jewish community.

“You could probably do the same story at Yeshiva University and you might get the exact opposite political trend,” David Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, said in an interview this week. “Having said that, the difference between right-wing support of Israel and left-wing support of Israel is that left-wing support much more easily morphs into indifference to and abandonment of Israel. That’s what the left wing has to guard against.”

***

Founded in 1875, Hebrew Union College has always been a proudly liberal institution. It has brought religious leaders through its ranks that have played integral roles in nearly every major social movement of the past century—from its social-action mandate in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform to the March on Washington in 1963. Rabbi Jerome Davidson, a longtime pulpit rabbi from Great Neck, N.Y., who teaches a required course on social action at the seminary, seems to exemplify a certain model of rabbi-as-political-leader popular at the institution. “As far as I’m concerned, a rabbi should be able to get up on his pulpit and speak about why it’s necessary to have stronger gun-control laws or why the death penalty should be abolished or curtailed or strengthened or whatever she or he thinks Judaism teaches us,” Davidson said in an interview this week. And to his mind, the politics that should be transmitted from the pulpit are very specific.

Continue reading: Politics from the pulpit

Yet even as America has stood by Israel in the past … and even as Israel faces these new threats to her very existence, a critical element of future U.S. support may now be in jeopardy.

As we are all aware, the United States is in the midst of a challenging fiscal period. Lawmakers are under severe pressure to make steep cutbacks across the board.

And that means that despite a 10-year agreement, America’s security assistance to Israel may very well be cut.

Perhaps the most prominent bloc associated with scrutinized aid in the context of larger austerity is the Tea Party, whose members are overwhelmingly Republican and which counts among its ranks the presidential candidates Rep. Ron Paul and Rep. Michelle Bachmann. Talk of deficits threatening aid followed a Republican debate last month, when several candidates mused on having all foreign aid “start at zero”—something AIPAC opposes even when it’s not Israeli aid (the letter also defends “the overall foreign aid budget”). Those candidates, notably Mitt Romney and Gov. Rick Perry, subsequently clarified that they have no intention of cutting aid to Israel; at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum last week, six candidates vigorously affirmed the importance of Israeli security (though not Paul, who was not invited and who sticks by his questioning of aid).

“All of the leading Republican presidential candidates said that we should start Israel’s foreign aid budget at zero,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, yesterday. “This upends long-standing U.S. support of our important ally, Israel—support that President Obama has dramatically strengthened and increased during his presidency—and would deeply undercut Israel’s safety and security.”

“This is a totally fabricated controversy on the part of the Democrats and particularly the DNC,” said Matthew Brooks, executive director of the RJC. “If you read what Mitt Romney said in his policy papers, he is unequivocally for increasing aid. Rick Perry clarified, and was unambiguous, that aid to Israel under a Perry administration would be increased. Newt Gingrich led the charge in Congress to increase aid.” The RJC has also cited the ten-year Memorandum of Understanding, which sets annual aid.

AIPAC apparently believes that the political climate, in which not a few voters— and most prominently Tea Party members who may prove crucial to deciding the Republican contest—is disquieting enough that they can at least raise money off of it. The letter does not mention either party or any proper names, citing only “the Administration” and “Members of Congress.” AIPAC had no comment.

It is notable that the Democrats are in the position of feeling vindicated by the group that to many represents the last word in being pro-Israel in American politics. Some Republicans have accused the Democrats of abandoning the U.S.’s traditional staunch support for Israel. A new ad from the GOP Emergency Committee for Israel asks, “Why does the Obama administration treat Israel like a punching bag?”

There seems little reason to be concerned about aid under any of the leading Republican candidates (other than Paul, who is running second in most Iowa polls—he is an exception even the RJC’s Brooks allowed). The suggestion that any of them might fiddle with the billions the U.S. sends Israel’s way each year “clearly does not jibe with the candidates nor the efforts of the Republican Congress right now—even with a lot of new members, they’re unequivocal in their continued support for aid to Israel,” Brooks said.

But the Obama campaign and Wasserman Schultz have cast the question more as a matter of Republicans’ need to pander to their voters. “These guys are so eager to please the most extreme elements of their Tea Party base that they’d forget about one of the most loyal allies our country has,” the chairwoman said in a recent email to supporters.

It’s not like AIPAC has no reason to bring up this fear—it’s a fundraising letter.

AIPAC may fear congressmen and senators the most. “We all agree that America faces a tough budgetary environment,” AIPAC’s Missner says in a post-script. “But any budget cuts should be made thoughtfully and with America’s long-term interests in mind.” He adds, “Unless we work with members of Congress, security assistance to Israel may be cut at exactly the time she needs it most.”

Related: Pro-Israel Group Running NYT Ad Slamming Obama [Politico]
Earlier: GOP Debate Prompts Clash on Israel, Iran

Recently, however, not long after our seventh wedding anniversary and the birth of our first child, we got some unsolicited marriage advice from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It arrived in the form of a series of videos produced by the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption as part of a campaign to encourage Israelis living abroad to return to the Jewish state. Each video depicts a different scenario of Israelis in America with their American partners and families, and the threat to their national identity if they remain there. One video shows the young daughter of Israeli parents mistaking Hannukah for Christmas.

It may be hard for the Israeli government to believe, but after 34 years of life as a committed American Jew, Lisa can consistently distinguish between Christmas and Hannukah, and she even knows which holiday we celebrate. Though Liel did exchange his passion for Krembos for a love for Malomars, he commemorates Israel’s Memorial Day each year, reflecting on the friends he’s lost. Lisa understands the importance of Yom Hazikaron and empathizes. But the American spouse in one of the Israeli government videos doesn’t: A pony-tailed American dufus, he mistakes his Israeli girlfriend’s yahrzeit candles for mood-lighting. As the video ends, a voice-over says, “They’ll always remain Israelis, but their spouses won’t always understand what that means. Help them come back home.”

Once upon a time, we used to believe that Israel could be our family’s part-time home. But this advertising campaign is just the most recent indication that Israel has no intention of making us feel welcome. From the Rotem Bill, which seeks to make a small group of ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbis the final arbiters over all Jewish rites, to the recent spate of anti-democratic legislation in the Knesset, over the past few years we’ve felt as if Israel is moving further and further away from the values—tolerance, plurality, and civility—that we believe are integral to Judaism as well as to our own lives. The videos are a painful reminder of this shift.

***

When we first got married, we spent a lot of our time traveling between New York and Tel Aviv. We were frequently met with a less-than-hospitable welcome at Ben-Gurion International Airport. On one occasion, Lisa was detained for nearly an hour, and on another she was subjected to a long and humiliating series of questions about her parents’ religious affiliation and other deeply personal matters. But we didn’t care: This intrusive screening, we rationalized, was the price Israel has to pay for its security.

Hanging out with friends and family on the beach or in cafés, we sometimes tried to talk about our life in New York, where being a part of the Jewish community is important to us. We attend services occasionally, are involved with numerous Jewish organizations, and spend a lot of our leisure time going to Jewish cultural events. To our Israeli friends, our interests sounded laughable. When Lisa wrote a novel about a Jewish-American teenager’s first encounter with, and burgeoning love for, Israel, she was told by several Israelis that no Israeli would ever read it—that Americans are just too naïve to be taken seriously.

Equally ridiculed as the book Lisa had written were the books she’d read: Like many American Jews, she grew up on Leon Uris’ Exodus, a fact that was repeatedly mocked by our Israeli acquaintances. Hearing the book belittled in a Haifa café, we realized how absurd it was for American Jews to idolize Uris’ Israeli protagonists for their dismissive attitude toward the book’s gullible American characters. And now, it was us being belittled by modern-day Ari Ben-Canaans for not being tough enough, real enough, Israeli enough.

It was a recurring theme in our conversations with Israelis: We heard countless times, from even our most fervently secular friends, that if we really cared about being Jewish we’d move back to the Jewish state. We found this logic offensive, but we still believed that we could build a bridge between Israel and the Diaspora, and we dreamed of raising children who would be as at home in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem as they would on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

***

An interesting, and often ignored, element of Israel’s new campaign is that, beyond insulting videos, the government is offering substantial benefits for Israelis who decide to return. Particularly sought-after are former Israelis like Liel: The website associated with the campaign emphasizes the incentives awaiting any Israeli who holds a doctorate from a major American university—part of a plan to fight Israel’s serious brain drain. Yet rather than highlight these attractive offerings, and take other steps to bring people like us closer to Israel, the Israeli government has chosen to tell us that the most fundamental choices of our lives—whom to marry and where to live—are irredeemably flawed and dangerous for the Jewish people. The cure? Make aliyah and abandon other key aspects of our identities—even, possibly, our spouses—save for Israeli nationalism. The campaign, then, is much more than tone-deaf PR. It is an indication of Israel’s troubling mindset, which, as our friend Gal Beckerman noted, is frighteningly similar to that of the old-world Jews that the early Zionists mercilessly mocked: the Jews who see nothing but danger and fear outside of the small and stifling Pale of Settlement.

Often, we feel real remorse for abandoning this struggle we believe is so important, the struggle for Israel’s soul. Often, we feel as if we should brave the hurdles and the insults and jump back into the fray. But time, parenthood, and an Israeli government that seems dedicated to dismissing families like ours and driving American and Israeli Jews apart have all weakened our resolve. We cherish our family’s Jewish identity and our community, as do most American Jews we know. But our Jewish identities, and our sense of peoplehood, are based on inclusion—not exclusion and condescension. As long as Israel refuses to acknowledge this basic premise about the nature of Jewish peoplehood, we can’t call the Jewish state home.

Thankfully, no violence occurred at the 2007 parade, though hundreds of anti-gay activists lined the route shouting imprecations and holding hateful signs. “Go to a shrink,” one particularly blunt poster read. “Go Away. Your sickness should be healed, not flaunted,” declared another. Over 7,000 police and army officers protected the marchers, and snipers were placed on the rooftops of nearby buildings.

As the ugly reactions to the parade revealed, the vast array of rights that gay people enjoy in the Jewish state—which include serving openly in the military, adoption, domestic partnerships, and the recognition of marriages performed abroad—did not emerge from nowhere. These rights are the fruit of hard work on the part of many activists, gay and straight, who had to push for them against politically powerful, socially conservative elements. This ongoing fight for inclusion was manifested most recently in the creation of an LGBT faction within the Labor Party, supported by all the party’s Knesset members except for Arab-Israeli MK Raleb Majadele.

But the struggles of Israeli activists and the progress they’ve achieved are meaningless to some, including Sarah Schulman, professor, novelist, and self-described “active participant citizen.” In a New York Times op-ed published last week, Schulman argued that these advances in gay rights are merely a “potent tool” in the Jewish state’s “pinkwashing,” by which she means Israel’s “deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.” As evidence of this so-called pinkwashing, Schulman cited the fact that the Tel Aviv tourism board is spending $90 million on a campaign to market the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” For Schulman, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reference to the Middle East as a region “where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted” in his May speech to Congress is yet another example of the sinister pinkwashing trend, also known in many quarters as diplomacy.

Schulman, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, isn’t the first person to employ the phrase. In May, a writer for Time magazine alleged that Israel and Israelis’ participation in a series of international gay events was part of a coordinated campaign undertaken “in the hopes of redirecting [Israel’s] global image away from politics, terrorism and the occupied territories.” Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab politics at Columbia University, told Time that Israel launched this effort “to fend off international condemnation of its violations of the rights of the Palestinian people.” (Massad has written a book, Desiring Arabs, which alleges the existence of a nefarious “Queer International,” with supporters of Israel at its core, whose “discourse … produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist” so as to paint Arab cultures as barbaric.)

The first fallacy of the pinkwashing meme is that it’s a non sequitur. No one is saying that Israel ought to be immune from criticism because it treats gay people humanely. Israel’s stellar record on gay rights does not prevent anyone from condemning the country’s settlement policies, its proposed ban on foreign funding of NGOs, or its lackluster effort to integrate Arab Israelis—issues that Israeli gay activists, many of them leftists, would gladly join Schulman in denouncing. But none of these failings renders Israel’s record on gay rights any less impressive, nor does touting that record constitute a covert method of justifying the occupation or racism against Arab citizens.

Schulman seems incapable of such discernment. “Increasing gay rights have caused some people of good will to mistakenly judge how advanced a country is by how it responds to homosexuality,” she wrote in the op-ed. While it would be foolish to judge a country’s “advancement” solely on the rights of gays, it is a telling standard. The protection of minorities is a bedrock principle of any liberal society, and it is an indisputable fact that sexual, racial, and religious minorities are better off in Israel than they are anywhere else in the region.

Though Schulman claims that, “pinkwashing … manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community” it is Schulman who renders these gains meaningless. According to her, the victories of gay-rights advocates in Israel do not exist in and of themselves, but are cogs in a grand propaganda machine to legitimize occupation and oppression. The effort to create a more open and inclusive Israeli society is merely part of a broader PR campaign—undertaken, ironically enough, by the same right-wing forces who recommended I see a psychiatrist to cure me of my homosexuality—to fool credulous Western liberals into believing that Israel is something it’s not.

While accusing the government of Israel and pro-Israel activists of deceiving well-intentioned progressives, Schulman and her ilk are in fact using the issue of gay rights to forward an ulterior agenda. So consumed are they by hatred of Israel that they are willing to distort the truth about the horrible repression of homosexuals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. If there’s any cleaning of dirty laundry going on here, it is Schulman’s whitewashing the plight of Palestinian gays.

Schulman’s assertion that homosexuality has been effectively “decriminalized” in the Palestinian territories since the 1950s when Jordan revoked colonial-era sodomy laws, will come as cold comfort to the countless gay Palestinians who have fled to Israel after being tortured or receiving death threats by Hamas or Fatah agents. Schulman’s claim would certainly come as news to Maen Rashid Areikat, the PLO’s ambassador to Washington. When asked earlier this year if homosexuality would be tolerated in a future Palestinian state, Areikat replied, “This is an issue that’s beyond my [authority].” Hamas strategist Mahmoud Al-Zahar was blunter. In comments directed toward Westerners, Al-Zahar told Reuters last year that “You do not live like human beings. You do not (even) live like animals. You accept homosexuality. And now you criticize us?” And whatever law might be on the Palestinian Authority books has yet to persuade the leaders of Aswat, a Palestinian lesbian organization, to relocate their headquarters to Ramallah from Haifa. By making the absurd claim that the issue of gay rights is being “manipulated” by the Israeli government, Schulman ends up making excuses for people who kill homosexuals.

Recognizing the enormous gap between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on their respective gay-rights records, critics of the Jewish state have gone to tremendous lengths to propagate a massive lie in order to win over Western progressives. This cognitive dissonance has driven ostensible intellectuals like Columbia University’s Massad to justify the oppression of gay Arabs, as he did in the aftermath of the 2001 “Queen Boat” incident in Egypt, when police raided a gay disco and 52 men were arrested, tortured, and put through a humiliating show trial. “It is not the same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian police,” Massad wrote in Desiring Arabs, “but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the Western identity of gayness and the publicness [sic] that these gay-identified men seek.” In a 2006 interview with the Advocate, Aswat co-founder Raudo Morcos complained about people who portray Palestinian culture as “backward” regarding its treatment of homosexuals. “What is backward? Backward to whom? Are we comparing the Middle East, the Arab community, to the Western world? This is not a fair comparison,” she said. But if Morcos and other advocates of the Palestinian cause genuinely believed in human rights then they would, without hesitation, acknowledge the suffering of Palestinian gays. It’s not mutually exclusive to criticize both Palestinians and Israelis.

Introducing the term “pinkwashing” into the mainstream debate about the Arab-Israeli conflict is edifying in at least one respect: It lays bare the delusion, paranoia, and cynicism of the Jewish state’s most earnest detractors. In their minds, any positive statement made about the country is necessarily part of a propaganda campaign in the service of a far-right agenda. For an increasingly large swath of the international left, there really is no good Israel can do, short of disappear.

“Israel and Egypt have an interest to preserve peace and stability,” said Prime Minister Netanyahu in response. He added that “nothing would be better for prosperity, for security, for peace,” than for Egypt to be democratic. Which is of course dubious! A democratic Egypt is very likely an Egypt run by the Brotherhood—indeed, the unrest of recent days has if anything strengthened the hand of the country’s oldest and most organized political party. Already, the Brotherhood has been able to throw its newfound weight around: through Egypt and Jordan (whose monarch is scared of his own revolt), it has blocked the demolition of a bridge in the Old City of Jerusalem. The point isn’t whether you agree that the bridge should not be removed (some allege the project is intended to ease settlers’ access to the Temple Mount). It’s that already popular Islamist movements in the Arab world have been able to affect Israeli policy.

Regionally, this has wider implications. The New York Times’ indefatigable Anthony Shadid published an essay yesterday taking stock of the region and noting that the Islamist complication, among others, means that the Arab Spring, which at various times over the past year has seemed so neatly tied up, is going to go through several more messy stages yet. Elections held Friday in Morocco saw the Islamist Justice and Development (yes, that is also the name of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s party) win the plurality of parliamentary seats. In Egypt, there are a number of ways this could all play out. The military council offered to immediately form a new government with one ex-prime minister; protesters rejected this and instead proposed a National Salvation Government to be helmed by Mohammed ElBaradei, the once and perhaps future presidential candidate.

Notably, the National Salvation suggestion was put forth by a coalition of Islamist and secular protesters, a sign that Egypt could at the least be moving toward a Turkey-style model of official but comparatively moderate and tolerant Islamism. (Still not great for Israel, if Turkey is any indication, but given that the alternative is something closer to the government of Gaza … .) Another promising notion is the truism that the surest way for an ideological movement to lose support is for it to gain power and be summarily introduced to the compromises that power necessitates. So far, Egypt’s Brotherhood has maintained a deliberate ambiguity about what exactly their vision of politically realized Islamism is—they know the second they are forced to articulate it, many of their supporters will disagree. Which is a good reminder of why democracy is indeed the worst form of government except for all the others.

Egypt’s Turmoil Shadows First Post-Mubarak Vote [NYT]
Analysis: Islamists Strong Ahead of Egypt Poll [Reuters/JPost]
Egypt’s Activists Unite Against Military [WSJ]
Post-Uprising, a New Battle [NYT]
Netanyahu Delays Demolition of Jerusalem Bridge Over Egypt, Jordan Warning [Haaretz]
Political Islam at a Crossroads [LAT]

The Hebrew phrase seudat-hodayah—“thanksgiving feast”—has inserted itself into the lexicon of both cancer doctors and patients here over the past seven or eight years. A seudat-hodayah is a cancer survivor’s celebration of having beaten the disease. I am invited to participate in them not only in November but throughout the year.

My first invitation was hand-delivered by a hulking disciple of a 66-year-old grand master of a Hasidic dynasty. Only a week earlier, I had finished treating the sage with cranial-radiation therapy for an aggressive brain tumor. Although I make very few house calls, I quickly resolved to adopt a new rule of thumb: When summoned by the consigliere of a rabbinical godfather, best not to refuse.

Alighting from the limousine sent to fetch me, I was surprised to discover that we had arrived not at the rabbi’s home but rather at a nearby synagogue. I was escorted to a podium, looking out over a sea of black. Nearly 500 admiring followers dressed in formal topcoats and fedoras had gathered in a cavernous sanctuary in the city of Bnai Brak to count their blessings and salute “the man who had saved their spiritual leader.” That was presumed to be me. I don’t remember precisely what I said during my impromptu remarks, but I do recall that I did not emphasize that the rabbi was unlikely to survive for more than one year. Instead, I elected to take part in their joy and to revel in my brief tenure as a rock star.

My second invitation to a thanksgiving feast arrived 10 months later. On this occasion, the patient himself requested that I join in celebrating the one-year anniversary of his completion of thoracic irradiation for lung cancer. This patient, a self-described flower child, boasted that he’d first had to survive Woodstock before he could survive lung cancer. Once again, the seudat-hodayah emphasized a sincere appreciation for both the care provided and the patient’s benefits in quantity and quality of life. The featured activity at that particular thanksgiving feast involved smoking expensive blends of marijuana (the nonmedical variety) and sharing an array of decorative bongs. I took a less active role at this celebration.

Nowadays, I am invited to a seudat-hodayah roughly every six weeks. The actual number is irrelevant, but what is reassuring is that I attend more thanksgiving celebrations for my patients than funerals. Festivities often include singing folk songs or a poetry reading along with the consumption of abundant quantities of ethnocentric comfort food: noodle kugel in homes that trace their ancestry to obscure Ashkenazic hamlets of Eastern Europe, couscous among families with a Sephardic or Mizrahi heritage. The overriding theme at all these affairs is gratitude.

Clearly, the seudat-hodayah is hip in Israel. The question most frequently asked by caregivers who wish to organize such a party is not whether to do it but when to do it. Indeed, a large number of family members want me to countenance, or even bless the propriety of embarking on such festivities at the desired juncture. In order to better answer these inquiries, I set out to identify the source of the seudat-hodayah in Jewish tradition.

If consensus exists, the origin of the custom may be found in Genesis: “And Abraham held a great feast on the day Isaac was weaned.” But there is controversy embedded in the scriptural passage. Was Abraham celebrating a specific developmental milestone (that is, the literal end of Sara breastfeeding Isaac), or was something more conceptual going on? In the ancient world, infant mortality was presumably sky high. So, could it be that weaning was actually a surrogate for Isaac’s authenticated survival of the only other major event that he experienced (that is, circumcision)? Applied to oncology patients, this question becomes: Is it proper to celebrate immediately after attaining a milestone (e.g., completion of treatment), or must one wait for a period of time to be certain that there is cause for celebration (e.g., the classical five-year-survival endpoint)?

Having considered that question on multiple occasions, for me the answer is now clear. Feasts of thanksgiving—little “t” or upper case—can be either an outgrowth of gratitude, as in emerging Israeli custom, or can inculcate gratitude, as with the American holiday. It is unfortunate that gratitude is in such short supply in modern societies, given its status as a prerequisite toward the attainment of happiness. For me, the correct time for patients to celebrate in thanksgiving has nothing to do with reaching conventional watermarks for oncologic cure but everything to do with feeling the need to express that sublime state of appreciation that we call gratitude.

To this day, even my closest friends struggle to understand why I would select a profession that orients itself around people diagnosed with malignant disease. But without these heroic patients, I would be nothing less than an ingrate. Repeatedly, cancer patients have taught me to value the intangibles that I tend to take for granted, especially good friends and good health. On this year’s Thanksgiving—the American one, with a capital T—between the football games, the jokes about Uncle Harvey, and the fight over the last piece of pie, may we remind ourselves of the wealth of things that we have to be thankful for in our lives.

“I felt like a time machine,” he told me. “I could not believe all the buildings. And when I came to the village, I didn’t know a soul.”

In the village of Saffa, west of Ramallah, Sumoud Karajeh, 23, is marveling at her new lease on life. In 2009, Karajeh was sentenced to 20 years in prison for stabbing a guard at the Qalandiya checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

“When I was in prison, I thought I will not be a mother, I won’t study until I am 40 years old,” Karajeh said last week in her living room. Now she’s moved back into her childhood bedroom, reconnected with friends, and plans to study social work at Al Quds Open University as she did before her arrest. “I will have a normal life,” she said.

***

Barghouti and Karajeh are only two of the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners Israel agreed to release last month in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured and held by Hamas since June 2006. Even though most Israelis support the swap, most also recoil at the idea that convicted militants like Barghouti and Karajeh have been given a chance to lead normal lives. And yet both say they have no regrets about the crimes they committed. For Barghouti and Karajeh, and scores of other Palestinians who could otherwise never enter Israel, prison, in fact, offers a rare opportunity to live in the belly of the beast. It serves as a rite of passage—a forge where Palestinian national ideals are hammered into place.

Karajeh spoke to me on a rainy day last week. A tiny schoolgirl carrying a yellow umbrella had pointed the way to Karajeh’s home at the edge of the village of about 4,000. A banner of Palestinian flags fluttered over olive trees in the yard. On the front door was a poster: “Free Palestinian Prisoners,” it said in English and Arabic. Inside, the house was cold enough to wear a jacket. A picture of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas embracing Karajeh leaned on a shelf next to an oversized stuffed puppy. Karajeh and her mother, Hanan, sat on ornate wooden chairs upholstered in gold. Karajeh wore a bright patterned headscarf, pristine white sneakers, jeans, and a blue cardigan. Pale, with thick black eyeliner and full lips, she had a gap between her front teeth that made her look younger than 23. While she spoke, her mother brought out tiny cups of strong coffee.

Though Karajeh admitted she was in prison because she stabbed an Israeli soldier, she refused to give any details about the stabbing or her motivation. An onlooker captured the event on a cell-phone video and posted it to YouTube. Karajeh said that Israeli intelligence officers had summoned her to the Ofer compound near Ramallah for a two-hour interrogation two days before we met, and she was still rattled by it.

The hardest thing about prison, Karajeh said, was the first 30 days. Israeli intelligence officers interrogated her deep underground in the Russian Compound, a prison steps from Zion Square in central Jerusalem, she said. For a month, Karajeh saw only the investigation room and the tiny cell where she was in solitary confinement. She could not tell what time it was. “Prison was like a grave,” Karajeh said.

I asked her how she stayed sane. “Well, my name is Sumoud,” she quipped. Sumoud is Arabic for steadfastness. “The soldiers would shout, and I would think to myself about my life, about my village and my street and my house,” she said. “I would remember my relatives and name their children in my head, and I would sing to myself.”

A religious Muslim, Karajeh said she trusted that Allah would deliver her from her suffering. And once she was tried and sentenced, life improved. Karajeh was transferred to the women’s division of Hadarim prison, and three months later to Damoun in northern Israel. It was her first time away from home, where she was one of seven brothers and sisters. The other Palestinian prisoners took pity on her. “They were kind to me because I was the youngest,” she said. “They would bring me gifts from the canteen. They would teach me things like English and Hebrew.”

Continue reading: ‘Israel made us kill’

When that attack happens, most likely in the early spring, Israel’s second Iranian war will officially begin. The first has been going on through much of the last decade in the battles Israel has been fighting with Iran’s local proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip—and in the secret war being waged against Iran’s nuclear program. The front lines of this war extend thousands of miles, from Bandar-Abbas, an Iranian port on the Persian Gulf, to the eastern Mediterranean and in the Arabian Peninsula, northeast Africa, and north into Turkey. This secret war involves the interdiction of Iranian arms bound for Hezbollah and Hamas and of vital components bound for Iran’s nuclear facilities. Few of these operations, such as the commandeering of cargo ships carrying missiles, are ever revealed as official Israeli actions.

When senior Revolutionary Guards officers, Iranian nuclear scientists, or key Hamas and Hezbollah operatives die or disappear under mysterious circumstances, Israel never takes credit, but it also never seems to dissuade the media from pushing the Israel-did-it angle. Same goes for Stuxnet, the computer worm that plagued Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz and Bushehr, which contained Jewish history clues in its code and featured briefly in a farewell video shown last year at an event honoring departing Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. (Stuxnet is widely believed to be the work of Israel, and the Jewish state encourages that view without actually confirming it.) Saturday’s missile-base explosion, which killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the founder of Iran’s missile program, was only the latest act in this not-so-secret secret war.

The great champion of clandestine war against Iran was former Mossad chief Meir Dagan. During his time at the helm of Israel’s spy agency, from 2002 until early this year, Dagan argued that the only way to counter Iran’s nuclear threat is through secret warfare, close coordination with the Western powers, and quiet alliances with Arab regimes threatened by Iran, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Dagan is a believer in the Ariel Sharon view of things—namely, that the Iranian nuclear program is a problem for the whole world, not just the Jewish state, and therefore Israel should do everything to avoid seeming like it is facing Iran on its own. In the meantime, clandestine warfare can slow Iran’s nuclear progress.

Netanyahu’s decision to replace Dagan—coupled with Barak’s insistence on removing popular army chief Ashkenazi in February—was seen by many as an intentional strategy to remove opponents of a military strike on Iran from positions of influence. In his last week as spy chief, Dagan infuriated Netanyahu and Barak by telling a group of journalists that Iran would not achieve military nuclear capability until 2015—a clear warning against a military strike in the near future, which he has since repeated emphatically in various forums.

The changes at the top of Israel’s security establishment, along with reports on intensive preparations for a strike, prompted U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to visit Israel in early October. Panetta publicly stressed during his visit that the United States is “very concerned” about the Iranian threat but emphasized that countering that threat “depends on the countries working together.” Panetta demanded that Jerusalem warn Washington in advance of an attack on Iran, but he did not receive clear assurances it would, according to American diplomatic sources.

Meantime, Israeli preparations continue. In late October, six Israeli Air Force squadrons sent aircraft 1,500 miles across the Mediterranean for a joint exercise over Sardinia with the Italian and German air forces. This is just one of over a dozen such exercises that have taken place in the last three years, in which Israeli pilots have trained in flying long distances over unknown terrain and facing fighter pilots and anti-aircraft batteries of foreign forces. Fighter pilots aren’t the only component in these maneuvers: Aerial refueling planes and search-and-rescue helicopter teams also take part. The object of these exercises is clear: to prepare an air force that primarily operates in the nearby theaters of Gaza and Lebanon to undertake long-range missions.

The lieutenant colonel who commanded the most recent exercise said cryptically after returning to Israel that “there was no mention of the third circle in the exercise, but we are training over distances and preparing ourselves for all terrains so you could say that it contributes to our long-range preparedness.” The “third circle” is the current air-force euphemism for Iran. (The first circle is the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel’s immediate borders; the second circle is countries around Israel.)

***

Ever since Saddam Hussein launched 39 Iraqi Scud missiles against Israel during the Gulf War in 1991, the Israeli Air Force has been preparing for one primary mission, a long-range attack against weapons of mass destruction aimed at the Jewish state. The lion’s share of Israel’s defense budget has been devoted to this. Five new squadrons of the most advanced versions of the F-15 and F-16, specifically modified for the long-range strike roles, have been acquired since 1998. And the numbers of spy satellites, aerial tankers, unmanned reconnaissance drones, and search-and-rescue helicopters have all tripled in the past two decades.

“Ninety-percent of our equipment and training is for a much larger war. The fighter jets weren’t built for attacking Gaza or even Lebanon; the real war is where we will have to prove ourselves,” one squadron commander recently admitted to me. The air force is eager to do just that. As one brigadier general told me last year, “Come the hour, I will have pilots breaking down my office door demanding to go on the mission.” And come that hour, when at least some of Israel’s defense chiefs are expected to counsel against a strike, it will be the Air Force commander, Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, the son of members of the Irgun, who will give Netanyahu the necessary backing, promising the decision-makers that an air-strike on Iran will succeed.

Yet even the most self-confident fighter jockeys cannot ignore the scores of Israeli and American analysts claiming that Israel lacks sufficient planes and its bases are too far away to totally eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. “We have no illusions,” one air force general told me. “We will attack Iran successfully but that won’t be the end of it. Two, or three, or five years later, we will have to go back there again.”

***

The decision to go to war with Iran is not a political one. It is one of the few issues that transcends Israel’s left-right divide. Benny Begin and Moshe Yaalon, two of the most hardline right-wing ministers in the “Octet Forum,” the Israeli Cabinet’s main decision-making body, are currently opposed to an attack because they believe a military strike will cause a massive backlash from Iran and its proxies and should only be a very last resort. The motives of Netanyahu and Barak are more personal and historical than ideological. The prime minister, the son of a historian, views the Iranian issue through the prism of Jewish survival. In his view, safeguarding Israel against a nuclear threat is the generation’s duty, which has fallen to him. As leader of the opposition, from 2006 to 2009, Netanyahu constantly compared Iran to Germany circa 1938 and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. As prime minister, he has refrained from this terminology but his perspective remains unchanged.

Barak also sees the challenge in generational terms. Two months shy of 70, he looks around and sees no one who, in his opinion, can be entrusted with Israel’s security. Israel’s great founders are gone, save for President Shimon Peres, whom Barak never rated highly (and who is against an attack on Iran). Barak is now the nation’s wise old man, the only responsible grown-up left standing. But his arrogant manner has alienated much of the public and the politicians. Divorced from the Labor party of which he was never an integral part, he leads a splinter faction that does not guarantee him re-election to the Knesset. Convinced that no one else can lead the nation in this challenge, in what could be his last year in government, he won’t let go without ensuring Israel’s security for another generation.

If there are any politics involved in the final decision to attack Iran, they won’t be Israeli. President Barack Obama is the one man who can prevent Israel from going to war. He will have two ways of doing this, if he so chooses. Come this spring, when weather conditions over Iran ensure better bombing results, if the polls indicate him winning a second term, he may have sufficient political and diplomatic clout to order Israel to desist. But in a close presidential race, with a GOP contender accusing him of going soft on Iran, Obama’s only way to block an Israeli attack on Iran would be sending the U.S. Air Force to do the job instead.

For months, the transitional military leadership has hewed awfully close to the style and even personnel of the ancien régime—some of the same folks have stuck around (de facto leader Field Marshal Tantawi has been a top-ranked military officer for a very long time, if you catch my drift). It has at times raised questions about how operative the word “transitional” is. And now the Obama administration, which for most of the year has turned a blind eye to these problems, is taking a harder line with Egypt’s government, insisting that it take democracy, including the parliamentary elections later this month, seriously. “If, over time, the most powerful political force in Egypt remains a roomful of unelected officials,” Secretary of State Clinton declared last week, “they will have planted the seeds for future unrest, and Egyptians will have missed a historic opportunity.” As the New York Times notes, the administration’s rhetoric is intended at least as much to mollify the Egyptian people as it is to sway Egypt’s leaders.

The bitter irony is that the will of the Egyptian people is frequently at odds with U.S. interests, particularly when it comes to the U.S. desire to see the Egyptian-Israeli peace maintained and generally that Egypt be kept in its sphere of influence. The tolerance of violent protests at the Israeli Embassy in Cairo; the detention of Israeli-American Ilan Grapel on dubious espionage charges; and the cultivating of closer ties with Hamas and Iran are all things Egypt’s leaders have done—likely in large part with a nod to popular will—that have rubbed the U.S. the wrong way.

To that list, you may add the country’s recent efforts to protect Syria’s Assad regime from what is becoming an extraordinarily broad movement to isolate it. European countries are pushing a U.N. General Assembly resolution to strongly condemn human rights abuses, France has recalled its ambassador, and even the Arab League—whose imprimatur was crucial to the NATO intervention in Libya earlier this year—has suspended Syria and threatened economic sanctions. But Egypt—unlike Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Sunni-ruled nations with which it usually aligns—is resisting the U.N. move and, as Foreign Policy’s Colum Lynch reports, seems to be acting as something like Bashar Assad’s surrogate.

Then again, earlier this week, Egyptian security arrested the Islamists it said were responsible for the deadly attack in southern Israel in August. If Egypt’s leaders’ first principle is self-preservation, and if you buy the line that the Egyptian-Israeli peace exists not just because of U.S. bribery but because of actual, deep-seated, structural common interests, then you actually can feel a little confident. It’s a final, less bitter irony.

U.S. Hones Warnings to Egypt as Military Stalls Transition [NYT]
Arab League Gives Syria 3 Days to End ‘Bloody Repression’ [LAT]
Is Egypt Carrying Water for the Syrians Again? [FP Turtle Bay]

Synonyms are both logical fallacies—no two words can be identical—and artistically useful (expedient, practical); synonymic poetics furthers that paradox into history, or histories. Which is to say that though the genres of tragedy and comedy transcend borders, races, and creeds, specific tragedies and comedies do not. The event one people celebrate with a victorious ode another people commemorate with an elegy of defeat.

Poetry that’s old enough, that has justified its age, tends to be credited to that greatest of versifiers, “Anonymous.” Let’s summon that God, for a moment, to bless the following scraps, translated into the neutrality of English:

How will you fill your cup
On the day of liberation? and with what?
Are you prepared, in your joy, to endure
The dark howling heard
From skulls of days glittering
In a bottomless pit?

And:

We survived much death. We defeated forgetfulness and you said to me: We survive, but do not triumph. I said to you: Survival is the prey’s potential triumph over the hunter. Steadfastness is survival and survival is the beginning of existence. We persevered and much blood flowed on the coasts and in the deserts. Much more blood than what the name needed for its identity, or what identity needed for its name.

The first fragment is a stanza from How? written in 1943 in the Vilna Ghetto by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. The second is from In the Presence of Absence, one of the last collections of stray sentences in paragraphs by Mahmoud Darwish, perhaps the foremost Palestinian poet of last century (published in Arabic in 2006, and this month by Archipelago Books, in a translation by Sinan Antoon).

That these two texts spring from a shared poetics can be denied only by those who read prejudicially, who judge books by covers of their own creation: When you oppress a people, when you beat and rape and kill them, the literature they write will inevitably resemble the literatures of other peoples who’ve been beaten, raped, and murdered (unless you’ve stumbled upon a happy tribe of masochists). But this shock must be admitted: The same poetics has sadly marked the literatures of Jews—not just Israelis—and Palestinians, in the same century—a poetics that fled Europe and hid, until it found another shelter.

***

Al-Birwa was a tiny olive, grain, and watermelon village in Western Galilee, Mandate Palestine. Darwish was born there to a Sunni Muslim family in March 1941, the same month and year the Nazis’ extermination camps became fully operational. In 1948, with war ended, war began: Darwish’s family was forced from their orchards by the nascent IDF’s Carmeli Brigade; they fled to Lebanon, to Jezzine and Damour. Later, they illegally returned to Israel—insofar as one can return to a different country—settling in Deir al-Asad, which had been renamed, in Hebrew, Shagur. (Darwish spoke fluent Hebrew.)

In 1970, Darwish, then a communist, briefly attended university in Moscow before migrating to Egypt and then to Lebanon again. There he joined the PLO, for which he coauthored the Algiers Declaration. When the PLO was expelled from Lebanon, Darwish went to Cyprus. Stints followed in Tunis and Paris. For his work in the PLO, the poet was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, originally the Stalin Peace Prize, which he accepted as idealistically as he’d later reject the Oslo Accords (which occasioned his break with Yasser Arafat).

It was Oslo, however, in its slight easing of restrictions in the Occupied Territories, that gave Darwish a temporary reprieve: In 1996, now a poet with an international reputation and a major cardiac condition, he finally received Israeli permission to settle in Ramallah. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, major infarcts had led to major surgeries. Though his literary heart was strong, his literal heart was weak—so went the global obituaries. In August 2008, while undergoing treatment at a hospital in Houston, he died. He’s buried in Ramallah, atop a hill called Al-Rabweh, “the hill of green grass”—a small snatch of his childhood Galilee transported to the dusty West Bank.

So do not reconcile with anything except for this obscure reason. Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains. For there is no other hell waiting for you. What once was yours is now against you.

And:

I am already quite scarce. For years
appearing only here and there
at the edges of jungle. My awkward body,
camouflaged by reeds, clings
to the damp shadow around it.
Had I been civilized,
I would never have been able to withstand.
I am tired. Only the great fires
still drive me from hiding to hiding.

Let’s avoid turning this survey into an exercise in perversity, a childish game: I’ve chosen to quote Darwish in his prose-poems, and the others, the original Others, enjambed. The man “already quite scarce” is the Israeli poet Dan Pagis. The source for the excerpt above is a poem called The Last Ones. The initial circumstance is the language, then the name and title, and only then, the poem. Bad poetry wants for forewords, good poetry, for afterwords, whereas Pagis’ poetry, like Darwish’s, needs a more encompassing apparatus—it necessitates experience.

Continue reading: A political coup

E.T.A. Hoffmann used to explain the wealth of imaginative figures that offered themselves to him for his stories by the quickly changing pictures and impressions he had received during a journey of some weeks in a post chaise, while still a babe at his mother’s breast.

What a child has experienced but not understood by the age of two he may never again recover, except in his dreams.

Many years ago I asked Aharon Appelfeld, the great Israeli novelist, why he did not write an autobiography—even though his best title, his only title, A Child of Our Time, had already been used.

“If I do,” he answered, “I will no longer be able to write my novels.”

The notion that the exploration of one’s own life, particularly one’s childhood, will drain the well of imagination is of course common enough. Call It Sleep and Midnight’s Children are among the greatest novels of the last century. That neither Henry Roth nor Salmon Rushdie, having re-experienced, having revivified, their boyhoods, could produce another work remotely as beautiful is enough to give anyone pause.

Nonetheless, the answer Appelfeld gave to my question—as he surely knows—is both true and insufficient. A more complex response lies in his small 1993 book Beyond Despair, which is as profound a meditation on the relation of memory to imagination as anything I know. Once, at Boston University, he gave a lecture based on one of its chapters. Afterward, my students stood together, not moving, not speaking, in the courtyard. “I can’t stop trembling,” said one of them, as I approached this little grove of human aspens. Holding the book now, I can’t help trembling myself.

Appelfeld, who survived a concentration camp as a child before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, begins by describing the equivocal relationship he and all survivors had with memory. The first task for all of them was not to remember. “Anyone who underwent the Holocaust will be as wary of memory as of fire. … People learned how to live without it the way one learns to live without a limb of one’s body.”

Naturally enough, among this remnant the need to think and write about what had befallen them could not be repressed. But how to do so? The disproportion between the events themselves and the means to express them was too great: “The sights were dreadful and immense, and words are frail and impotent.” The inevitable result was a kind of distortion, a falseness, a misemphasis. The testimonies and memoirs were written in haste, without skill, with no sense of proportion or introspection. In each a battle raged between revelation and concealment. Most were marked by “a search for relief” and not the search for truth. Moreover, in Israel there existed a sense of shame, a feeling of guilt, that exerted a constant pressure to celebrate brave Ghetto fighters and partisans and noble peasants who risked their lives to save Jews, rather than expose the overwhelming majority who were at best indifferent or actively tried to kill them.

But even worse than faulty or distorted recollections were those unfettered by personal experience at all. These writers of fiction were attracted to “the bizarre, to the exceptional, to the speculative and—far worse—to the perverted.” Appelfeld does not give an example, but I will: the Grand Guignol and inauthentic horror in The Painted Bird.

Do not think that Appelfeld exempts his own work from such criticism. On the one hand, “memory itself proved to be the enemy of my writing.” But when he turned to imagination, his poetry and fiction consisted mainly of sentimental excess and cries to God. Caught between a memory that failed him and an imagination he could not trust, he came to the turning point when he stopped writing about himself and instead focused on a Jewish girl with similar experiences. “Miraculously, as though with a magic wand, my compulsive memory was removed” and in its place came a redefinition of memory itself: not so much recollection, or thoughts that could be put in words, but certain sights, sounds, smells, colors, sensations, what, significantly, Hoffmann called “quickly changing pictures and impressions.”

Then, in the place of actual memory came the freedom to experience, or re-experience, what we can call privileged moments: something as simple, Appelfeld tells us, as a few twigs floating on the surface of a pond, the sun on them, the way they shiver in the wind and turn, and turn again, on the current. In such moments, and in their recollection, one may undergo a feeling of enchantment that Appelfeld calls “true memory,” or “inner memory,” or “a warm emotion.” (Here we should very much think of such moments, such recapturings—a madeleine in a teaspoon, an uneven paving stone, a few notes from a sonata—in Proust, who has been neglected as one of Appelfeld’s masters.) Once in possession of “inner memory,” Appelfeld was able to write not “what happened but what had to have happened.” That is say, his work, moved from history to art, not only to his Tzili, the Story of a Life but to all the other wonderful novels as well.

***

But we have yet to answer fully the question: why no A Child of Our Time? The answer may be in another Appelfeld book that, like Tzili, is called A Story of a Life. This is less an autobiography than what Appelfeld called it, “segments of contemplation and memory,” just as Beyond Despair is called “reflections and feelings,” or, elsewhere, “a series of sensations and images and above all emotions.” In that non-autobiography Appelfeld says what I think any sensitive reader might have deduced from his entire oeuvre: that, in fact, about those six years of war, “I don’t remember, and that’s the whole truth.”

Continue reading: Wonder

Along with Walter B. Slocombe, who served as undersecretary of Defense for Policy under President Bill Clinton, Blackwill detailed his findings in a paper just published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Israel: A Strategic Asset for the United States” argues that the United States not only shares national interests with the Jewish state—like preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and combating terrorism—but also reaps numerous advantages from the alliance.

The paper offers chapter and verse on Israeli contributions to the U.S. national interest. They include: Israeli counter-proliferation efforts, such as the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility and the 2007 attack on Syria’s secret nuclear facility at al-Kibar; joint military training exercises, as well as exchanges on military doctrine; Israeli technology, like unmanned aerial systems, armored vehicle protection, defense against short-range rocket threats, and robotics; missile defense cooperation; counterterrorism and intelligence cooperation; and cyber defense. Blackwill and Slocombe conclude that the alliance is in fact so central to U.S. national interests that U.S. policymakers should find ways to further enhance cooperation with Jerusalem.

Blackwill and Slocombe’s detailed list is a unique event in the ongoing U.S. policy debate over the advisability of this bilateral relationship. Blackwill says that for all the media attention devoted to Israel, he and Slocombe were surprised to find no comprehensive account of Israel’s contribution to the U.S. national interest existed previously. “I figured I’ll just Google it,” he told me this week over the phone. “But there was no existing encompassing list. So, we went item by item, making sure we had the facts straight. We didn’t exaggerate or overstate the contribution.”

The fact that Slocombe is a Democrat and Blackwill is a pillar of the Republican policy establishment is meant to drive home the strategic nature of their argument. According to Blackwill, the alliance has nothing to do with who’s in the White House, whether the Israeli prime minister is Labor or Likud, or how much movement there is on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “It is meant to be a grander argument,” he says. “National interests don’t change, except over the very long term.”

What has changed—in a positive way—is Israel’s ability to advance U.S. national interests. The national-interest case for Israel would have been harder to make 20 years ago, argues Blackwill. That shifted as “defense cooperation in the ’90s began to be enhanced,” he told me. “It’s increased greatly over the last few decades.”

Though Blackwill served as Condeleezza Rice’s National Security Council deputy for Iraq during 2003 and 2004—in Rice’s recently published memoir she calls him “one of the best policy engineers I had ever known”—it would be a mistake to identify him with the famously pro-Israel neoconservative camp of Republican policymakers. Rather, Blackwill traces his intellectual roots to Henry Kissinger, for whom he worked as a staffer during the 1973 Arab-Israeli crisis. And it was Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s secretary of State during that crisis, who was perhaps the first Republican policymaker to understand Israel’s strategic value.

Where President Harry Truman felt a moral responsibility and emotional attachment to Israel, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican commander-in-chief to deal with the newly formed Jewish state, saw Israel is a strategic liability. He believed the Arabs were offended and alienated by America’s closeness to Israel. Eisenhower eventually came to a different understanding—Arabs’ hostility to Israel was far less crucial to the region’s dynamics than he previously thought—but, more significantly, he recognized that the Middle East was a key venue to defeat the Soviet Union.

This was Kissinger’s starting point. With the 1973 war, Kissinger saw that Soviet arms in the hands of Egypt and Syria could not be allowed to triumph over Israel, Washington’s client. During the course of the war, Kissinger came to understand that Cairo could no longer afford the cost of being Moscow’s ally. In order to enable Sadat to jump sides and join the American camp, Kissinger had to prevent the Egyptians from being humiliated and give Sadat a defeat that he could sell to his people as a victory. A peace treaty between Israel and the largest Arab state would both neutralize Moscow’s role in the Middle East and establish Washington as the undisputed power broker in the region. With Israel backed unconditionally by the United States, the Arabs could no longer afford to wage war against the Jewish state, he believed. And if they wanted anything from Israel, then only Washington, as Kissinger understood, could deliver those concessions.

As Martin Kramer explained in his 2006 essay “The American Interest,” the Pax Americana in the eastern Mediterranean was a tremendous accomplishment for U.S. policymakers. At $3 billion in aid annually, Israel’s friendship is a bargain. If the United States had an Israel in the Persian Gulf, another powerful ally it could count on to do its heavy lifting and keep the United States from having to land troops, Washington might well have avoided three decades worth of trouble in that part of the Middle East, from Saddan Hussein to al-Qaida to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The fact that Israel’s strategic value is lost on so many American journalists, analysts, and policymakers is largely a function of dogma, Blackwill argues. Given that so many American groups, from Christian evangelicals and the American Jewish community to the oil lobby, have a position on the U.S.-Israel relationship, it’s hardly surprising the issue generates heated emotions that tend to make the subject impervious to analysis. This affects American decision-making and public diplomacy. For instance, the U.S. Department of State, Blackwill’s home shop, is certainly not known for sending its foreign-service officers out to the Middle East to challenge Arab officials and journalists every time they say something negative about the Jewish state. The U.S.-Israel relationship really does make it harder for American diplomats to do their job—and so they just keep their mouths shut and internalize the Arab argument against the alliance.

But the hazards of the diplomatic profession shouldn’t obscure the facts of the matter for U.S. policymakers. If the alliance with Israel really is a liability to U.S. national interests, there should be concrete evidence to back it up. “We tried to identify episodes when you could plausibly argue that Arab governments exacted a price from the U.S. for its alliance with Israel.” Blackwill said. He and Slocombe found only one example: the Arab oil embargo after the 1973 war.

“Without doubt that embargo was related to the U.S. re-supply during the ’73 Arab-Israeli war,” Blackwill said. “We thought, ‘Well, there have to be other examples. We’re just not looking hard enough.’ But to our surprise, we couldn’t find another example from that instance to today.”

Why, then, is the notion that the United States pays a price for its alliance with Israel such a prevalent theme? “People confuse what Arabs say and what Arab governments do,” Blackwill explained. “No doubt Arabs complain very genuinely about our relationship with Israel. They don’t like it. And it’s not surprising then that U.S. ambassadors send these negative Arab views back to Washington. However, our piece doesn’t argue that the American relationship with Israel is popular in the Arab world. Our approach was to gauge the question analytically, and ask, what action have Arab governments taken? And it turns out that the policies of Arab governments toward the United States are dominated by their overall perceptions of their national interests, not by the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

For instance, as Blackwill and Slocombe speculate in their paper, would the Saudis lower their oil prices “if Washington entered into a sustained crisis with Israel over the Palestine issue during which the bilateral relationship went into steep systemic decline?” The answer, of course, is no. As is the case with all rational actors, what matters most to the Arabs are their own national interests. Yet Blackwill acknowledges that the Arab Spring may change the equation insofar as it empowers potential populist movements that look at the U.S.-Israel relationship from a very different perspective than their governments have.

In any case, the core of Blackwill and Slocombe’s argument is that the alliance with Israel is vital to U.S. interests regardless of how the Arabs see it, or how it’s interpreted by any given American administration or Israeli government. “Israel’s people and politicians have a deeply entrenched pro-American outlook that is uniformly popular with the Israeli people,” they write in their paper. “Thus, Israel’s support of U.S. national interests is woven tightly into the fabric of Israeli democratic political culture, a crucial characteristic that is presently not found in any other nation in the greater Middle East.”

Conservative writer Ira Stoll revised his unexpectedly lukewarm take on OWS following the Boston march. “The whole event illustrates the way the Occupy movement has become a forum for people to air whatever pre-existing grievance or agenda they have, even if it has nothing to do with Wall Street,” he argues. True. He adds: “And how readily a protest against bankers can elide into one against the Jewish state.” That’s nuts, and he knows it. He has just finished saying that OWS’ problem is that hangers-on can hijack it. He knows the movement is of the left, and specifically, to an extent, of the organized hard-left; he knows that the organized hard-left is staunchly pro-Palestinian; obviously, the organized hard-left is taking it in that direction because of its preconceived beliefs about the Mideast. To suggest the turn is connected to a protest against bankers—which is to say, to suggest that the turn is fundamentally anti-Semitic—is disingenous. As for Jonathan S. Tobin’s fearful panting that “Liberals who make common cause with OWS are making a deal with an anti-Semitic and radical devil,” if he ever looked at these people, he’d know how crazily hysterical he is being.

And yet can I say, as I could a month ago, that he is being not only hysterical but inaccurate? Yesterday, a “Jewish call to action” was released, to “occupy the occupiers” in the Jewish community, “the powerful institutions that support Israel’s corporate-backed military control of the Palestinian people.” Leaving aside that such a specific stand is against Occupy Wall Street’s “no-demands” mission—which I heard a member of the Demands Group staunchly defend at a panel on the movement last night in New York—who are these powerful institutions? They include “AIPAC, the Jewish Federations, Birthright, the Jewish National Fund, Hillel.” (Hilariously, it doesn’t include those anti-colonialists at J Street.) These groups “actively obstruct human rights for Palestinians”? Hillel? It was necessary to “occupy” a small Birthright event in New York last night? They think the Jewish 99 percent opposes Federation?

It’s not to say these institutions couldn’t be reformed; the case against Birthright, for example, is real, even if it’s far more complex than the “99 percent” rhetoric allows. But tethering this cause to OWS drowns out the economic message, significantly decreases the size of the OWS tent, and maybe most importantly of all discredits the entire movement in the minds not just of the right but of plenty ordinary decent folk—members of the actual 99 percent.

Occupy Boston Occupies Israeli Consulate [Future of Capitalism]
Occupy the Occupiers: A Jewish Call to Action [Mondoweiss]
Related: One Percent [Tablet Magazine]
Preoccupied [Tablet Magazine]

Scheyer was referring to his new team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, the wildly successful basketball organization that signed Scheyer to a two-year contract this summer. Playing at the highest level is something Scheyer has done for years: He led Duke to college basketball’s 2010 national championship as the team’s captain. At a reception for the team at the White House Rose Garden, President Barack Obama called Scheyer his “homeboy from the Chicago area.”

Many think Scheyer has the chops to become one of the best Jewish basketball players ever. At 24 years old, Scheyer has already been honored twice by the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, so it wasn’t surprising that a crowd greeted him at Ben-Gurion Airport when he landed in July. On the day he moved to Israel, immediately after he declared citizenship, the website ynetnews.com published a news story with the headline “ ‘Jewish Jordan’ Jon Scheyer Makes Aliyah.”

There is no Israeli basketball team quite like Maccabi. “Every team is coming at us every night,” Scheyer said. “It’s just like Duke.” It’s the last undefeated club in the Israeli League and one of two unbeatens left in the Adriatic League. What’s more, Israel has never sent a team besides Maccabi to the Euroleague final, but Maccabi has five Euroleague titles of its own. Last season, it lost in the championship.

This isn’t the first time Scheyer has combined Judaism and basketball. Before he joined Duke’s legendary team, Scheyer guided Glenbrook North High School to the 2005 Illinois state championship, the first title for a North Shore suburban school in 27 years. The feat was all the more remarkable for another reason: All five of Glenbrook North’s starters (plus the first player off the bench) were at least half-Jewish. It’s hard to imagine another championship basketball team with a starting lineup that knows the difference between a chest pass and Passover.

Scheyer was raised in the sort of town where two bar mitzvahs per weekend was not uncommon. Scheyer’s father is Jewish, and Scheyer became a man on a November weekend in 2000. “I always joke with him that I’m going to get his bar-mitzvah invitation signed and sell it on eBay,” said Sean Wallis, a captain on Glenbrook North’s championship team, who now works as a consultant in Chicago. The day of his bar mitzvah, in fact, was particularly chaotic for Scheyer’s seventh-grade class. In the afternoon was the sports-themed bar-mitzvah shindig for Zach Kelly, who would go on to become Glenbrook North’s starting forward in 2005; Scheyer’s bash was that night. For party favors, he gave out T-shirts printed with the phrase “Jonathan in the Zone.” His theme was basketball.

How could it not be? Scheyer and his buddies grew up in the Chicago suburbs when Michael Jordan and the Bulls won six NBA championships between 1991 and 1998. “We were really in an age when we didn’t know any different,” said Kelly, who played professional basketball in England last year. “Michael Jordan and the Bulls were the only thing we knew.”

It wasn’t long before Scheyer was forging a profile of his own. He dropped 21 points in his third varsity game and attracted serious attention from colleges as early as his sophomore season. “He was tall and really, really skinny,” said Dave Weber, his high school coach. “I thought he was going to break in half sometimes.” But his lanky frame didn’t stop him from scoring. Scheyer led the team in points and assists as a freshman and finished as an all-state selection the next season. He ended up rewriting Glenbrook North’s record books; his 3,034 points in high school was the fourth most in Illinois history.

It was during his junior year, in Glenbrook North’s improbable run to the state championship, that Scheyer established his bonafides in a Jewish sports community that adores its own. The Spartans were so popular that they received police and fire-truck escorts during their victory parade. “No one ever thought it could happen,” recalled Weber, who still coaches the team. “It was bigger than anything I’ve ever been through in sports.” The allure of Glenbrook North wasn’t just that it was reminiscent of Hickory High School with its own Jimmy Chitwood. It was more like Hoosiers meets The Chosen. Even the rabbi from a local synagogue showed up at the school’s first playoff game with a sedimentary keepsake from Israel. He named it the Rally Rock.

“Jewish, white, none of that matters to me in terms of a basketball player,” Scheyer told me over Skype. “I didn’t want our team to be popular because we were all Jewish. I wanted our team to be talked about because of how great of a team we were.”

The Scheyer frenzy hit a fever pitch at the famed Proviso West Holiday Tournament during his senior year, which happened to fall on the fourth night of Hannukah. By that time, Scheyer had committed to play at Duke for Mike Krzyzewski, another Chicago native, and the coach was part of the standing-room-only crowd that watched what the Chicago Tribune called “the greatest performance in the 45-year history of the Proviso West tournament.” Scheyer scored 21 of his tournament-record 52 points in the game’s final 75 seconds. A Duke improv troupe later filmed a sketch, titled “Jon Scheyer in 75 Seconds,” that features him riding a bicycle into the campus Hillel, emerging in a tallit and a flowing beard, and spinning a dreidel that lands on a gimel. (The clip has been viewed more than 160,000 times on YouTube.)

Maccabi began courting Scheyer before he graduated from Duke last spring. He was coming off a four-year career that he capped with a national championship, but Scheyer went undrafted by NBA teams. While playing in the 2010 NBA Summer League, he suffered an eye injury and moved home for most of the year. He joined an NBA Development League team in February and averaged 14 points per game while wearing protective goggles.

That’s when Maccabi came calling again. With the NBA in a lockout that shows no signs of letting up anytime soon, his friends and family sold him hard on the opportunity to play in Israel. Some of them had visited on Birthright trips and told him how much they cherished their two-week visits. The process took more than a year, but in July Scheyer finally signed with Maccabi.

Starring immediately in Tel Aviv would be like earning All-American honors as a freshman at Duke—not even Scheyer did that—and the transition to the Israeli basketball court hasn’t been as glamorous as his arrival. He has yet to play in Maccabi’s two Euroleague games, and he has averaged about 10 minutes per game in the Adriatic and Israeli Leagues.

“When I was going to Duke, you know it’s going to be such a high level, but you don’t know what to expect until you get to your first practice,” Scheyer said. “No matter how many times you watch, or your teammates have told you, you just need to experience it. The game is played differently. It takes a little time to get adjusted.”

In the meantime, Scheyer says he is savoring Tel Aviv. He insisted that he is not looking past his time abroad, much as he’s striving for an NBA contract some day, and he has been particularly pleased with his new homeland’s culinary fare. “Being a picky eater, to say I like the food here, that says a lot,” Scheyer said. “Italian, a Thai restaurant that’s very good, some American restaurants.”

Then he remembered where he was. “I haven’t had a falafel yet,” he admitted. “I’ll probably be made fun of. I need to have a falafel and shawarma.”

Ha-Borer uses the world of organized crime as a backdrop to explore timeless Jewish questions about morality, community, and belonging. It also deals with many of the most pressing issues facing Israeli society in the 21st century, from rising wealth and inequality to the ethical dilemmas of war.

Immensely popular in Israel, the show deserves to be seen by anyone who wants to understand how contemporary Israelis see themselves and the world around them. If you speak Hebrew, go to the website of Israel’s HOT cable network and watch it now. If you need English subtitles, wait until your next El-Al flight to Israel and watch the show on in-flight entertainment.

In the meantime, here’s what you’re missing: The show follows the family of Baruch Asulin, an aging mafia boss known as “Ha-Borer” for his role as a mediator of underworld disputes. The Borer is a ruthless killer, but he is also a traditionally observant Sephardic Jew. He frequents the neighborhood synagogue and is often shown settling mobsters’ disputes by referring to Torah law, which he quotes extensively, always from memory.

In Ha-Borer’s first season, the Borer is contacted by a long-lost illegitimate son, given up for adoption at birth. The son, Nadav, was raised by the middle-class Feldman family and is studying to become a social worker. As the two men bond, Nadav finds himself drawn unwillingly into the Borer’s criminal milieu. Revealing a surprising acumen for ruthless strategizing, Nadav becomes the Borer’s trusted confidant in a war against a hated rival: Yigal Mizrahi, a mobster so cruel that he is nicknamed “Yigal the Nazi.”

Together, the aging Sephardic gangster and the young Ashkenazi social worker dodge bullets and plot their next moves. Along the way, they debate philosophical questions of right and wrong, the meaning of family, and the significance of traditional Jewish values for contemporary life. Religious pragmatism meets secular idealism head on, over and over. In one scene, Nadav appeals to conscience, only to have the Borer cut him off in mid sentence. “In Judaism there is no conscience,” he says. “There are only mitzvot.”

In another episode, the Borer turns down a business proposal from his old friend Faruki, who plans to make it big smuggling drugs into Israel from Lebanon. In an Israeli twist on a classic scene from The Godfather, the Borer expresses his objection to the drug trade in terms of Jewish solidarity. “I love you very much, just as I love every Jew,” he tells his would-be partner in crime. “But you are going down the wrong path.”

Using a crime-show script to explore questions of philosophy and religion is a dangerous move. Done wrong, such a combination could seem forced, even absurd. But Ha-Borer pulls it off smoothly, with believable dialogue and top-notch acting.

What makes the show work? Director Shay Kanot, who created the series with screenwriter Reshef Levy, pointed out that the action in Ha-Borer unfolds at a rather relaxed pace: Because of budgetary constraints, each episode has fewer scenes than is customary in American television. This allows for each scene to be richer and more fully developed, he told me. “We try to make every scene include some kind of action, some kind of witty line or joke, and something for viewers to think over in their heads,” he said.

Kanot and Levy created Ha-Borer by building on years of experience in prior collaborations, including a short-lived police show called Tik Sagur (“Case Closed”) and the comedy film Ahava Colombianit (“Colombian Love”). The show’s minor characters, like the Borer’s hyper-religious daughter, reflect familiar Israeli social types. Even the choice to portray a mafia boss from an Orthodox background, which may seem incongruous to American Jews, makes sense in the Israeli context. “Israel’s most famous criminals generally come from Mizrahi families which uphold religious traditions,” Kanot said. “It’s not unusual to see a family of six children, where one brother is a rabbi and another is a gangster.”

Ha-Borer captures the zeitgeist of the past decade in Israel, a country that has experienced amazing economic growth and shown surprising resilience in the face of war and terrorism but is terrified by the prospect of losing its soul, either through the greed of capitalism or the savagery of war. The show examines the state of Israel’s soul without providing a definite diagnosis. The sadistic cruelty of the gangsters is on full display. So is the callous indifference of citizens and government officials. At the same time, Ha-Borer shows how certain national values endure, even among criminals. One memorable scene opens with a pair of the Borer’s henchmen choking a man who is trying to back out of a deal with their boss. When they discover that the victim’s son was a paratrooper who died in Lebanon, they stop immediately. “I was a paratrooper too,” one of the toughs says, “and I also fought in Lebanon.” Out of respect for the family’s sacrifice, the gangsters leave empty handed.

Three seasons of Ha-Borer have aired on Israel’s HOT cable network, and a fourth season is in the works, with filming set to begin in May. The show’s stars report being stopped on the street by fans, some of whom seem unable to distinguish between the actors and the characters they play. The show is allegedly popular with real mobsters too, and several of Israel’s more colorful mafia leaders reportedly believe that the scripts are inspired by their own life stories.

Ha-Borer is finally neither a celebration nor a condemnation of the gritty Israel it portrays. As a story of Jews making tough decisions in a dangerous world, the show reflects Israel’s determination to keep struggling both with its enemies and with its own internal demons.

In April, Goldstone essentially disowned the so-called Goldstone Report, which was the result of the U.N. Human Rights Council investigation into the 2008-9 Israel-Hamas conflict, and its finding that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. Today, in the New York Times, he rejects the allegation, prominent in “assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize” Israel, that there is apartheid either in Israel proper or the Palestinian territories.

Goldstone in fact is an eminent South African jurist who would be considered an authority on what is and isn’t “apartheid,” and in that sense his essay isn’t unimportant. It clears Israel of apartheid in Israel, where Arab citizens vote and for the most part participate equally with Jews in civil society. And even in the territories, Goldstone argues, quoting an international treaty, “there is no intent to maintain ‘an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group’” (a conclusion he reaches partly under the assumption that Israel eagerly wants a Palestinian state, and soon, which one could quibble with). If the distinction seems semantic, the reason it’s not, Goldstone implicitly argues, is that “apartheid” is an unusually inflammatory term, and is therefore especially dangerous when inaccurately deployed. He concludes: “The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.”

The ostensible occasion for the op-ed is an NGO “hearing” in Cape Town, South Africa, next weekend over whether Israel is “apartheid.” But Goldstone’s not fooling anyone. The man whom many would finger as most responsible for the international campaign to “isolate, demonize and delegitimize” Israel now fights that campaign. The latest in a line of Jewish outcasts that stretches back to Spinoza (or to Moses?), he wants back in to the fold. And here is where the psychodrama goes mass-scale: Can we forgive him?

Israel and the Apartheid Slander [NYT]
Earlier: Goldstone Retracts Israeli War Crimes Claim

My father understood this and helped whenever he could. There are agricultural communities, he used to say, “that I cradled in the palm of my hand.” This never stopped our kibbutz neighbors, all of whom belonged to the Labor Party, from coming out to protest outside the gate of our farm, armed with angry placards. He used to remind our friends from the nearby kibbutzim, the ones who came to our house, “During the day you stand outside the gate and protest, and at night you sneak inside and ask for help.” He would say that with a forgiving fatherly smile. But then he would come to their aid, always, and even when he was in the opposition and their people, Labor, were in power, they still came to him. The difficulties of agricultural communities such as kibbutzim or farming villages, quite frankly, don’t interest the members of either party.

My father’s other role in Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government was as chairman of the Ministerial Committee on Settlements. In this role he put Likud policy and his own beliefs into practice. He founded many dozens of settlements in Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip, Galilee, the Golan Heights, the Negev, and in the Arava. If somebody was needed to speak about our rights to the land of Israel and the security need for settling different areas in Judea and Samaria, there was no better man than Begin. The history of his movement is filled with flaming speeches and ideological directives, but those stand in stark contrast to their record of actual accomplishments.

My father was born into a different culture, pragmatic Zionism, which believed in simply getting things done: establishing another village, laying another water pipe, planting another orchard, tilling another furrow of earth. Political Zionism, which Begin and his people believed in, attached great power to words, to each comma in their ideological constitution, and far less importance to the actual execution of those ideologies. It was only natural, then, that my father would be the one to translate Likud ideas into action.

My father began to consolidate his thoughts on the matter of settlement in Judea and Samaria during his service as Yitzhak Rabin’s adviser. He believed that Israel could not under any circumstances afford to return to the June 4, 1967, lines. Living within those borders, Israel was attacked by Jordan and suffered for years from Palestinian terror. Pre-1967, Israel’s width along the coastal plain at the country’s center, where the majority of the population lives and where the national infrastructure such as power plants and the airport is housed, is only a few miles across. That is not a defensible border. The plan that my father drafted and brought before the government for approval offered solutions to several problems—Israel’s lack of depth along the coastal plain, its vulnerable eastern front, and the safeguarding of Jerusalem. Holding a large map, he presented his vision to the ministerial committee in September 1977, three months after being appointed minister of agriculture. What he showed them was a line of settlements along the high ground that looms over the coastal plain. In that way Israel was given depth at its most vulnerable point and it secured control over the dominant terrain, which could no longer be occupied by hostile forces.

Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia all waged war against Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. They constitute what is known as the eastern front. Even Labor governments have recognized the need to create a line in the Jordan Valley, which is nearly entirely empty of Palestinian villages. A Labor government had already erected a thin line of settlements along the Jordan River. My father’s plan called for fortifying the hills to the west of the Jordan Valley with additional settlements, building a cross-Samaria road that would be protected by settlements and serve in a time of need as emergency routes for troops heading to the eastern front.

The third element of his plan was Jerusalem. The question was how to secure Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people, especially in light of the post-1967 wave of Palestinians flocking to the city. In the decade following the war, the Arab population increased by more than 50 percent.

The solution my father presented was a ring of Jewish settlements around the city. This would preserve the demographic character of the city and would prevent the threat of making Jerusalem a part of an urban Arab bloc stretching from Bethlehem in the south to Ramallah in the north.

On Oct. 2, 1977, the Cabinet authorized the plan, putting it into motion. My father and his aide Uri Bar-On, a brigadier general in the reserves who was also a close friend, began surveying the terrain, mountain by mountain, hill by hill.

The points chosen were state-owned lands that were untilled and uncultivated. These lands had been the property of the Ottomans during their rule, then the British, followed by the Jordanians and then Israel. He worked with the Ministry of Justice, accompanied by Plia Albeck, the head of the civil department of the state attorney’s office. As Albeck explained, “My job in regards to the settlements was to make sure that the land upon which they want to build a settlement is state land and that no individual rights are infringed upon.”

My father would laugh when recalling his trips with her on helicopters and on rocky hillsides, her hair covered according to Orthodox tradition in a kerchief and her feet in boots. Her rulings regarding state land all stood up under appeal to the Supreme Court.

During the following four years my father spearheaded the effort to found 64 new settlements in Judea and Samaria. But the rise of the Likud to power and the fact of his service in government were not enough to get the project off the ground. They needed people willing to settle the land, too. These were found in the form of the Gush Emunim loyalists. These God-fearing religious nationalists felt that settling in the biblical land of Israel was a commandment of supreme importance. Years later, my father would remark with a smile that they viewed him as “the Messiah’s donkey,” the man who would help them realize their ideals and faith.

Excerpted from the book Sharon: The Life of a Leader by Gilad Sharon. Copyright © 2012 by Shikmim Agricultural Farm Ltd. English translation copyright © 2011 by Mitch Ginsburg. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Often askew, the frames in One to Nothing offer geometric compositions in a palette of the desert: sand, mud, rust, washed-out skies, and Jerusalem stone. Human or animal subjects are often in repose, with their eyes hidden, such that they become as much a part of the sunburned landscape as a cypress, a bougainvillea blossom, a Jewish star on a gate, or a car that has gone over a cliff. But even in their anonymous stasis, the people appear unaccommodated. Rozovsky—who now lives in Russian Brooklyn but grew up on the north shore of Boston after narrowly missing direct emigration to Israel with her Soviet Jewish parents—acknowledges that though her pictures contain humans, they are not portraits. “They’re more actions and gestures,” she told me recently, “human effort abstracted.”

In one, a man climbs a gated fence from one part of an ancient wall to a seemingly identical part. In another, a young couple—embracing, mourning, or reconciling, it’s hard to say—find the space to fully hold each other between parked cars. A camel’s head is tucked such that it’s impossible to know if the animal is coming or going. A family seems to have made its home in a tent on a remote beach across from a turbulent sea, while another couple has found an idyll by pushing a wheelchair to the coastline. A young frum girl, in her jean skirt, stands glumly in thigh-deep water, while a mud-covered woman pushes against the earth as if to nudge it along in space.

In fact, though, there is no such thing as an apolitical view of Israel—the stakes are too high, and the history too deep. A move toward abstraction could be viewed as the cheapest of cop-outs—the artist might be saying, I won’t take sides because, hey, there are no sides to take. Or it could be viewed as an artful transcendence that subtly and not-so-subtly acknowledges and engages the political background to take the specific land and identity struggles of that part of the Middle East and kick them into the universal slog of existence. That distinction is carried in nothing more than the quality of the art. Here, where that abstraction is successful—where these conceptual images could only have been taken in Israel, now—the overall effect is to suggest that in the harsh landscape of the Holy Land, nothing is much, much greater than one.

The Provisional Government had issued an ordinance on May 26 establishing the Israel Defense Forces and prohibiting “the establishment or maintenance of any other armed force.” On June 1, Menachem Begin, the Etzel (also known as the Irgun) leader, signed an agreement with the government whereby Etzel units would join the IDF in battalion formations and take an oath of loyalty. The Etzel’s separate command structure would be disbanded within a month, and the organization would cease buying arms abroad.

Nevertheless, on June 11, the Altalena, a ship that the Etzel had purchased, set sail from southern France with a large quantity of arms and explosives on board as well as some 850 immigrants. As it approached the shores of Israel, Begin informed the government that 20 percent of the arms would be sent to Etzel units in Jerusalem. Since Jerusalem was not yet formally under Israel’s jurisdiction, Yisraeli Galili, negotiating for the IDF, agreed. Begin then proposed that the remaining weaponry go first to equip Etzel units within the IDF. Whatever was left could then be allocated to other units. Galili balked. He reported to Ben-Gurion on June 19 that the danger of a “private army” was evolving. Ben-Gurion convened the cabinet. “There are not going to be two states,” he declared, “and there are not going to be two armies. And Mr. Begin will not do what he feels like. … If he does not give in we shall open fire!” The cabinet resolved unanimously to “authorize the defense minister to take action in accordance with the law of the land.”

Ben-Gurion feared that Begin might use the arms aboard the Altalena to equip Etzel units outside the sovereign jurisdiction of the state—thus ostensibly not violating his commitment—in order to extend the war with the Arabs into the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), thereby defying government policy.

The Altalena anchored off Kfar Vitkin, a moshav, or settlement, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and hopefully far from the prying eyes of U.N. observers, and began off-loading the weapons with the help of hundreds of supporters who had gathered at the site. Galili and Yigael Yadin, chief of operations for the IDF, deployed troops to surround the beach and ordered Begin to surrender. Some of the troops with Etzel sympathies crossed the lines and lined up with the Altalena crew and its enthusiastic sympathizers. The ship, with Begin and other Revisionist leaders now on board, weighed anchor and put out to sea, chased by IDF craft. It sailed south toward Tel Aviv and eventually ran aground close to the shore. At army headquarters in Ramat Gan, I spent that night with a rifle in my hand in Ben-Gurion’s office, in case the headquarters compound was stormed by demonstrators.

Off the Tel Aviv boardwalk, a traumatic scenario unfolded the next day. Etzel soldiers and civilian sympathizers streamed to the site. Some waded into the sea and swam out to the ship. At military headquarters, Ben-Gurion paced back and forth, fuming. Eventually he issued written orders to Yadin to concentrate “troops, fire-power, flame-throwers, and all the other means at our disposal in order to secure the ship’s unconditional surrender.” Yadin was then to await the government’s instructions.

Ben-Gurion then convened the cabinet again. Some colleagues suggested possible compromises, but he was of no mind for any such weakness. “This is an attempt to destroy the army,” he thundered. “This is an attempt to murder the state. In these two matters there can be no compromise.” The cabinet backed him. Small-arms fire broke out between shore and ship. The government evacuated homes and shops in the line of fire. The Palmach commander Yigal Allon, now a senior IDF general, was put in charge of the operation. He ordered a cannon deployed. Yitzhak Rabin was in command of it. The first shell fell wide, but the second struck the vessel. Fire broke out in the hold. Those on board began to abandon ship. (It stood barely one hundred yards from the beach.) But before they could all do so, an explosion tore through the ship, destroying it. Sixteen Etzel men and three IDF soldiers died in the episode; dozens more were wounded.

Begin delivered a two-hour broadcast live on Etzel radio that night, roundly cursing Ben-Gurion who, he claimed, had been out to kill him. For his part, Begin said, he would continue to restrain his men and thus prevent the outbreak of civil war: “We will not open fire. There will be no fraternal strife when the enemy is at the gate.” Ben-Gurion spoke at the People’s Assembly, the transitional parliament. He said that since the arms had not been destined for the IDF, he was glad they had been destroyed. He added a line praising “the blessed cannon” that had fired at the Altalena—a phrase the Revisionist stalwarts never forgot nor forgave.

Excerpted from Ben-Gurion: A Political Life by Shimon Peres in conversation with David Landau. The book, published as part of the Jewish Encounters series from Nextbook Press and Schocken Books, is out this week.

With the help of journalist David Landau, Peres has written a new biography of Ben-Gurion, his mentor: Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, available now from Nextbook Press. Landau, a former editor of Haaretz and Israel correspondent of The Economist, spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Ben-Gurion, his realpolitik approach to leadership, and what lessons his example can provide to Israel’s leaders today. [Running time: 30:09.]

Did I know anything about Jon Voight? I knew the famously tough-guy actor has emerged as a strong, vehement supporter of Israel, seemingly of the Christians United for Israel school—the obvious thing I could take away from the trip he made to the Holy Land earlier this year with evangelical uber-Zionist Mike Huckabee, the Fox News host and former Arkansas governor. They had visited the site of a planned Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem and hobnobbed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And I knew that Voight was slated to be in New York City during the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly to attend a conference titled “The Perils of Global Intolerance: The United Nations and Durban III,” sponsored by Touro College and the conservative Hudson Institute. I had called his agent seeking an in-person interview about his very public Zionism, and Voight had phoned back.

But I hadn’t known enough to predict an impromptu lesson in Zionist history. Voight wound his way, like a skier expertly slaloming past every flag, through the Mandate, the Mufti, the Holocaust, and the partition. “And as we know, again, there was silence from the world community,” this time as Arab nations invaded the brand-new State of Israel, Voight said, his voice high-pitched with agitation. “No one said anything from that body.” He meant the United Nations. “We didn’t.” He meant the Americans. “France didn’t. Germany didn’t.” Well, we recognized Israel, I pointed out. He spat back, defending Israel’s founders: “But they did nothing to stop them from being annihilated. Nothing! Just like they did nothing to stop them from being annihilated during the Holocaust. When they could have stopped the murder of hundreds of thousands, of millions of lives.”

I asked Voight why he felt so strongly about this issue. “How can you not have an admiration?” he replied. “You walk the land in Samaria,” he continued, referring to a part of the West Bank by its biblical and politically charged name, “where I was, and you are amazed at what they’ve been able to accomplish.” What on paper would be boilerplate—what must seem to you as boilerplate—felt credible in his impassioned voice. What was less clear was where the passion came from.

***

A few weeks later, I found myself in a mid-sized, mildly ornate room on the second floor of the Millennium U.N. Plaza Hotel, across the street from the U.N. General Assembly building on the East Side of Manhattan. Several dozen of us were there to listen to a roster of speakers—including Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, John Bolton, Ed Koch, and the omnipresent Huckabee—inveigh against the persistent anti-Israel bias within the building on the other side of First Avenue, which that day was playing host to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing as well as Durban III, a re-re-affirmation of a 2001 U.N. conference’s notorious report that had toyed with revivifying a (since-annulled) General Assembly resolution stating that Zionism is a form of racism. Huckabee provoked the loudest applause of the afternoon when he called for Israel to accelerate settlement-building. Conference speakers dropped Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s name the way rock aficionados drop Jimmy Page’s.

If you were looking for him, as I was, Voight was instantly recognizable, a cap of thinning gray hair half-a-head above the other seated figures near the front. Men with real presence tend to have large features, but Voight has small eyes and a tiny, half-triangle of a nose that get crowded out by his ruddy-complexioned, square face. In profile, his long, flat, vertical jaw is almost a dead-ringer for that of his daughter, Angelina Jolie.

“My dear fellow Americans,” began his prepared remarks when his turn came to speak, “I’m here today to express my outrage that anti-Semitic Arabs can give themselves the right to decide the fate of Israel, when we all know by now that the Arab and Palestinian mandate is to wipe Israel off the map.” When he reached his rousing conclusion, it sounded like it was written by a conservative who had been forced to watch 40 hours of The West Wing:

And now, they try to spew out this insane new poison: Zionism is racism. These people, who themselves are terrorists and killers, are trying to find new ways to bring hatred to the Jewish people once again. [Dramatic pause.] Zionism is philanthropy, a belief in helping others, a belief in life, and freedom. “To save one life is to save a world.” It is belief in God and good. The Palestinians that have orchestrated this lie believe in death and killing. It’s just their way of covering up who they really are. If Israel falls, America will fall. Let us stay tuned and focused on the Palestinian agenda at the U.N. President Abbas is a Holocaust denier and wants to create another holocaust for Israel with his agenda, and he is trying to make it all look legal, to point fingers at the people of Israel, who are the true democratic society and human rights-keepers. I pray that every good, God-fearing American understands the truth of this onslaught. My love to you all.

As much as Voight relished his prepared oration, bomb-throwing but carefully wrought, he also seemed genuinely, enthusiastically earnest in his opening remarks, which can so often seem perfunctory. “I’m a fan,” he’d said of the other presenters. Conference organizer Anne Bayefsky was “this beaver after the truth.” Black conservative intellectual Shelby Steele was “my good friend, who sees this from a new aspect.” Smart English guy Douglas Murray was “quite brilliant.” Ruth Wisse’s “insights and her words about anti-Semitism were quite brilliant—and she’s up in Harvard.” He added, to more laughter, “That’s like coming from Hollywood!”

After the conference, I introduced myself to Voight, and he told me I could take a walk with him. He seemed delighted to be in my company, which surprised me, because I had sent his representatives repeated emails and put in numerous phone calls after that initial conversation, but I had received no reply. “An eager person like yourself should be rewarded,” he told me.

We arrived at First Avenue. “What building is that?” he deadpanned. The United Nations, an erect rectangle of glass next to a snug, curled horizontal French fry of white adobe, was directly in front of us. It was after six, and most of the diplomats and protesters seemed to have gone. “When I look at it, I always think, Maybe they’re fumigating it,” he said. “It would be the perfect thing to do to the whole place: fumigate. Get rid of all the rats.”

This was not the only outrageous thing he said to me. “There is no Palestinian people,” he had told me over the phone. “Palestine was the name of that area given by the Romans—comes from the root ‘Philistine.’ They were just Arabs that came there.” And there was the speech.

Moreover, Voight was once a sergeant of the counterculture. In 1969, he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the titular role in Midnight Cowboy, a Southern good ol’ boy who finds himself a hustler in New York City. In a bit of convenient symbolism, his main competition for the statue was the ultimate old-school cowboy, John Wayne. Wayne won, for True Grit; Midnight Cowboy, however, took home Best Picture honors—the only X-rated film ever to do so. Voight still lives in Hollywood. Recent roles have included Pope John Paul II and FDR. In 2001, Voight also played the coal-miner father of the male model Derek Zoolander’s in the Ben Stiller comedy Zoolander, a role so deadpan it absolutely required a sense of humor.

I prodded him again about why he chose defending Israel, out of all possible causes, to promote. “I’m just trying to do what I can,” he said. “I can contribute some of my celebrity—that’s helpful. And that’s a reason to have celebrity, to do something good with it. If you have physical strength, you can use that. If you have money, you can do something with money. You give what you have.”

Exhibit A in the use of celebrity toward good causes, I pointed out, might be his daughter. “It’s not a coincidence, obviously,” he replied. “Her mom was a humanitarian, I’m a humanitarian.” However, I pointed out, her causes are quite different. Starving African children and West Bank settlers don’t look the same, least of all in Hollywood’s eyes.

We were standing still now, periodically shuffling back and forth, like two boxers in the ring. (Voight had won every round.) The late afternoon took on a weirdly quiet quality; First Avenue was still closed off, but, most of the day’s business complete, few people were actually around.

“When the left walked away from the murder that took place when we pulled out of Vietnam—all the millions of people who were massacred when we pulled out—it should’ve awakened anybody that was on the other side, who was against the war,” he told me.

But the narrative of the ’60s lefty turned contemporary conservative isn’t exactly original, and, knowing this, you tend to look for something specific. Voight’s association with Huckabee led me to assume that his faith, no doubt some evangelical Christian variant, was what led him to feel strongly about Israel, and that his Southern upbringing planted the seeds for his conversion that just happened to take 30 or 40 years to bloom.

Isn’t he from the South? That’s what I had assumed back before he first called me on that afternoon. His most iconic character, Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck, was a Texan hayseed. And in my imagination, he was most shaped by his role as Bud Kilmer, the racist redneck coach of the West Canaan Coyotes in 1999’s MTV-produced Varsity Blues.

Well, apparently, it’s called acting for a reason. Voight is from Westchester County, N.Y. He was raised not evangelical but Catholic. “I knew Jews from the community that I come from,” he had told me on the phone. “My father was a golf professional at a Jewish country club. So, when I was very young, I understood anti-Semitism, because these people at the club who were employers of my dad couldn’t get into other clubs because of anti-Semitism. So, they built their own club.”

He continued: “I grew up understanding that these people were for some reason the victims of bigotry or racism or whatever you want to call it, and I saw them to be admirable people. They had the freedom to build their own club.

“No one told me that,” he added, “I just knew it. I grew up with these people. I liked them—they were my dad’s mentors, because he grew up as a caddy at the same club. I was very fortunate to grow up in their company as well.” Voight, it turns out, was born in Yonkers. The club in question is Sunningdale; it’s a little farther north, in Scarsdale.

But back to First Avenue, creeping ever closer to dusk. “I usually say, ‘Don’t ask about people’s political affiliation,’ ” he told me after I asked him, one more time, why he should give a damn about Israel and the Jews. “I’m interested in knowing about the truth and acting on it. That’s it.” Voight was getting excited again. “I would say the Republican Party is being attacked by the left—vilified—much like Israel is being vilified across the world. And I say it’s wrong.”

We were alone on the sidewalk, everything getting dark as the sun prepared to set. “So then when that happens”—the Republican Party is being vilified—“I say: ‘I’m a Republican!’ That’s what I say. I say, ‘Hey, you’re gonna pick on these guys? Pick on me! I’m big enough. Go ahead, take a shot.’ ”

It’s strange the White House would miss an opportunity to pose as Israel’s worried and protective friend and ally, especially facing a presidential election campaign that some worry is losing Jewish support and money. After all, administration figures like Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta can’t insist strongly enough that Israel is isolated from the rest of the world and that the United States is the only one in its corner.

Amid all the different theories concerning the Iran plot—that the Iranians aren’t really behind it because they’re too smart, or that it was orchestrated by a rogue element of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards looking to embarrass Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—it is perhaps most useful to look at this recent effort as the final test Iran will face before it gets a nuclear weapon. Seen this way, it is clear that the White House wouldn’t want to highlight Israel’s spot in Iran’s crosshairs, because no matter how many times President Barack Obama tells Israeli officials and Jewish audiences that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be unacceptable, his administration’s real policy position has just been exposed. A demand for more sanctions against Tehran in response to an operation intended to slaughter hundreds of American allies in the U.S. capital—in a series of attacks that would have also caused hundreds of American casualties—makes it clear to everyone, especially the Iranians, that Washington isn’t going to do anything serious about stopping Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

Because Washington doesn’t want to do anything about Iran, it has little choice but to ignore it—or deny its machinations. Let’s look at the Iranian record in Iraq, and how former and current U.S. officials chose to explain it away. In 2007, Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he doubted that the Iranian government knew about the Iranian-manufactured IEDs killing American soldiers. The same year, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and a National Security Council staffer under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, claimed that the “The involvement of these outside actors”—that is, Iran-backed militias—“is not likely to be a major driver of violence” in Iraq. And most recently, Biden told a veterans group last summer that “Iranian influence in Iraq is minimal. It’s been greatly exaggerated.”

This gives rise to the notion that the Iranians are endowed with supernatural powers that allow them to wage operations around the world so clever and sophisticated in their planning and execution that they barely show any fingerprints. But it is not Washington’s lack of evidence that creates this idea; rather it is absence of will.

The 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack of the U.S. embassy there the year before, as well as the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, all bore the imprint of the Islamic Republic. The 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran and the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie clearly did. Indeed, the whole point of Tehran’s policy of terror is to lay claim to its actions and dare the United States to respond—which Washington doesn’t. What Ayatollah Khomeini said about the embassy hostage crisis more than 30 years ago still holds true: “The Americans can’t do a damn thing about it.” Admitting Iran’s involvement in repeated acts of terror would require the United States to act—something American policymakers believe that we are unable to do.

But the reality is that the United States can do something about it, if Washington wanted to. American taxpayers would be rightly aggrieved that our defense budget is so high if our elected leaders can’t stop an adversary that speedboats to harass a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf and includes Toyota pick-up trucks in its order of battle. Surely the far-superior American military is capable of bringing Iran’s armed forces to heel.

The problem is that Obama’s White House, like George W. Bush’s, fears that taking too active a role against Iran and its assets will put U.S. military personnel at risk of Iranian retaliation in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to some U.S. intelligence estimates, Shiite Iran is responsible for far more American deaths and injuries in America’s two Middle East combat theaters than al-Qaida or other Sunni factions. That means that American strategists, civilian and military, no longer consider the U.S. military a deterrent to Iranian actions; rather, the presence of American troops in theaters where the Iranians also operate has effectively deterred the United States from taking action against Tehran.

U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Washington’s policy of not confronting Iran about its openly aggressive behavior have created a situation in which our troops are now effectively being held hostage, a situation that Iran underlines with each new act of aggression and terror. Which is why U.S. policymakers cannot recognize the pending withdrawal from Iraq—or what is effectively the liberation of many thousands of American hostages—as an opportunity to go after Iran. Instead, Washington will continue to wage clandestine operations against Tehran—like killing Iranian nuclear scientists and sabotaging Iranian centrifuges with a computer worm. None of those operations will stop the Islamic Republic from getting the bomb—rather, that secret war, presumably conducted in tandem with Israel, is meant only to deter the Jewish state from attacking Iran in earnest.

Yes, the Iranians hate the Saudis, who reciprocate the sentiment, and the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, targeted in the disrupted plot, seems especially detested by the Islamic Republic. As the WikiLeaks cables showed, it was al-Jubeir who reminded U.S. diplomats that Saudi King Abdullah “told you to cut off the head of the snake,” meaning Iran. The point of the Iranian plot was to show that the Americans are incapable of protecting their allies, even in the U.S. capital. But as mad as the Saudis are at Washington for not doing anything about the Iranians, sometime down the road they’ll be prepared to grit their teeth and cut a bargain with their foe. There is no such deal in the offing for the Jewish state.

More to the point, the Iranians recognize that unlike Saudi Arabia, Israel is capable of doing something about the Islamic Republic’s ambitions. In the last five years, Jerusalem has waged war against two of Tehran’s clients, Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 and Hamas in the winter of 2008-09. Also, it’s worth remembering that the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 attack on a Jewish community center there were retaliations for Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s then-leader Abbas Mussawi. (Iran and Hezbollah left their fingerprints on those operations, too. The issue in Argentina was not insufficient evidence but police and prosecutorial incompetence.)

If the only country able and willing to go after Iran’s nuclear program is Israel, the only one who is capable of stopping the Israelis, Tehran realizes, is the United States. And so Iran and the United States now find themselves in one of the Middle East’s oddest alliances, with the United States unwittingly aiding Iran in its effort to get the bomb. If this happens, Tehran will use this new weapon to remake the political map of the Middle East in ways that are very unlikely to benefit the United States, and will directly threaten the survival of its closest ally.